Flavors of Hepburn (was Status of Japanese requests)

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Wed Oct 7 05:01:53 CEST 2009


"Phillips, Addison" <addison at amazon dot com> wrote:

> I am not. I support (and have said so on this list) the approval of 
> the Hepburn subtags. I am not sure if the other subtags were also 
> approved. I thought at least one of them had been withdrawn.

The two Hepburn subtags were approved.  The two other subtags were 
rejected (Michael used the term "dropped").  That is not to say that 
subtags for these varieties won't ever be considered, but they would 
have to be re-proposed.

I agree that all this should have been stated explicitly at the time the 
decisions were made.

> I pointed out the appeals process, not because I intend to use it in 
> this case, but because others may not agree with approval to the 
> extent that they wish to appeal. It is a much more serious problem to 
> remove a record from the registry after the fact than to appeal it 
> before insertion. By not announcing decisions publicly, as required, 
> it is unclear what has been approved and what the inserted record 
> is... and thus anyone in disagreement loses their last opportunity to 
> say so. I recall at least one occasion in which a record was announced 
> as approved by the reviewer only to be pulled back due to public 
> outcry on this list. This was possible only because formerly insertion 
> requests to IANA were copied to this list.

But here we have an interesting situation.  According to Section 3.5, 
the first of the Reviewer's options is:

"Explicitly accept the request and forward the form containing the 
record to be inserted or modified to <iana at iana.org> according to the 
procedure described in Section 3.3."

Note carefully that these two actions happen more or less 
simultaneously: the Reviewer "explicitly" accepts the request (i.e. 
announces his acceptance on-list) *and* forwards the material to IANA. 
This is not a "last call" period during which someone in disagreement 
would have a "last opportunity" to object.  It can be assumed that by 
the time the decision has been announced, the registration materials are 
already in IANA's hands.  It may have been the intent of LTRU to provide 
a "last call" period, but that is not what Section 3.5 says.

We -- the entire list -- need to prevent surprises and last-second 
pullbacks like the one you mentioned (I don't know if that was 
"es-americas" or another example).  The way to do this is not only for 
the Reviewer to make the required public announcements, but also for 
list members to pay attention to the review periods and not save their 
comments until the last possible second.

--
Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s ­



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