639-3 updates

Frank Ellermann nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de
Sun May 13 13:17:50 CEST 2007


John Cowan wrote:

> Remember that if 639-3/RA makes a change, we *must* follow them;
> there is no choice in the matter by the terms of 4646bis.

That's not the case, the LTRU folks can put as much MUSTard about
oddities like "art", "mis", "mul, "und", "zxx", "zxxx", "i-default",
or similar in their document as they see fit.

They can even go as far as to exclude tags when they are unusable
for anything remotely related to the overall goal of stability.

For the country codes there is already a fallback mechanism in
place excluding incompatible reuses of country codes.  When some
subtags like "mis" are inherently volatile they should be also
inherently forbidden, shown by a clear "Deprecated: date C" (for
the date of the publication of 4645bis + 4646bis) in the registry.

Last but not least the subtag review list can add comments to the
registry for all records under "open and transparent" IETF rules
(as they are, at least I know where to find them, for ISO I have
 no idea what to do when they screw up royally).

It's the purpose of the language subtag registry to protect the
Internet from incompatible changes or similar surprises.

Frank




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