ID for language-invariant strings

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Fri Mar 14 07:16:15 CET 2008


Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

>> As for "zxx", the fact that the strings are in natural language is as 
>> irrelevant as the English origins of "if" or "O_RDONLY".
>
> Your point wrt "zxx" is valid to the extent that the primary, intended 
> *purpose* of the strings is a non-linguistic one. In this application, 
> though, the strings are likely to be actual linguistic strings in some 
> language, so to declare they are non-linguistic doesn't feel quite 
> right.

It's a "less bad" fit than the other choices:

zxx - content is not linguistic in nature
und - content is in an undetermined language
mis - content is in an otherwise uncoded language
i-default - content is in a default, fallback language intelligible to 
anglophones

I agree that inventing a new code element/subtag for this situation 
would be undesirable.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
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