ID for language-invariant strings

[Randy Presuhn]

Hi -

>From: Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com>
>Sent: Mar 13, 2008 1:04 AM
>To: "ietf-languages at iana.org" <ietf-languages at iana.org>
>Subject: ID for language-invariant strings
>
>What are people's thoughts about language tagging for
>language-invariant strings?
>
>I'm working with a group on an application scenario in which
>we have a table of strings in various languages that name
>entities, but we also need to support entries that have a
>reference name that is considered a language-neutral form
>of a name for a given entity.
>
>Strictly speaking, these would be strings intended for programmatic
>operation and not human consumption, and so, some might argue,
>are not in scope for IETF language tags. However, these are
>exceptional: almost all of the strings in the same table are
>intended for human consumption, and RFC 4646 is the spec being
>applied for identifying the language of strings in the table.
>Moreover, the strings in question *are* (in general) in a human
>language; they are just the values that are adopted to be used
>for language-neutral referencing.
...

I agree that there are situations where such a thing would be
quite useful.  I've run into them many times myself.
I'm open minded about possible solutions.

Randy