BCP47 Appeals process

[Doug Ewell]

Lang Gérard <gerard dot lang at insee dot fr> wrote:

> How would you tag the obliged orthography for french inside the net, 
> that suppress almost every diacritics and is perhaps the today most 
> important form of written "french", FR-internet ?

The word "obliged" surprises me; I would not have guessed that anyone 
was actually *required* to type French without accents.

If this is a well-recognized orthographic variation, genuinely 
considered a "different way" of writing French, or if there is a 
requirement to process it differently in some way, then it's not 
entirely impossible that "French without diacritics" could be considered 
for a variant subtag.  Probably the same could be said for other 
languages, especially those that normally require a large number of 
diacritical marks.  After all, polytonic and monotonic Greek have their 
own variants.

However, if this is just a typing convenience, or a hack to get around 
character encoding problems or historically poor support in e-mail for 
non-ASCII letters, then there is no justfication IMHO for a variant 
subtag.  The same would be true for other such hacks, like the use of 
the apostrophe in Italian to replace acute accents.

The name 'internet' would almost certainly be inappropriate for such a 
variant; it alludes to too many other concepts associated with the 
Internet, such as Internet slang and abbreviations like LOL and TTYL and 
IMHO, or technical jargon.  A better solution (as is often the case) 
might be to pick a name that is more descriptive of the variation, such 
as 'ascii' or 'noaccent'.

If you do decide to go this route, please remember to use the 
registration form from RFC 4646, and be prepared for a debate.  As 
you've seen lately, we leave no stone unturned.

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