deprecating www as language code

[CE Whitehead]

Hi. 
 
Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Fri Apr 8 23:57:36 CEST 2011
 
> Casey Brown wrote:
>> I'm not exactly sure why this request turned into an attack on
>> Wikipedia. The mention of Wikipedia was just an example case to
>> illustrate the possible issues.[0]
> I'm not attacking anyone or anything. It's a known fact that several
> Wikipedias are referenced through non-standard language codes. Try
> http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page for one example; there is no
> BCP 47 language subtag called 'simple'.
 
Then "wawa.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" should be a possibility (but "simple" does look to me more like a language variety than a language; so it's not quite the same as wawa).
 
> Melinda didn't say so, but I got the impression that the request to
> change code element 'www' originated with someone from Wikipedia.
>> If you want to keep it around just for the sake of keeping it around,
>> that seems pretty stupid. ISO is supposed to make things easier
>> through standardization, but there's definitely some degree of common
>> sense involved. As someone else mentioned here, when someone sees
>> "www", are they going to think Wawa or are they going to think
>> "worldwide web"?
Probably the latter I would think (but this may just be my personal view).
>> A Wawa speaker probably wouldn't even assume the
>> code were "www".
>  Deprecated subtags (in ISO 639, code elements) are "kept around" not
>  because it's fun to amass useless clutter, but because it's a bad idea
>  to invalidate existing tagged data. Someone, somewhere, might have used
> ISO 639 or BCP 47 'www' to identify some Wawa data, or to offer users an> option to select Wawa data. Pulling the rug out from under these users
> by invalidating their legitimate use of the standard would not only be
> evil for the Wawa users, but would discourage everyone else from being
> able to trust the stability of the standard.
> The problem is not in someone seeing 'www' in a vacuum and thinking
> "Wawa" versus "World Wide Web." The problem, as Kent said, is in
> creating a Web architecture where one of the subdomains *might* be a
> language code, as in "en.wikipedia.org", or it *might* be something else
> entirely, as in "www.wikipedia.org". That is symbol overloading, and it
> is not good engineering practice; it forces the architect to assume
> there will never, ever be a language code of 'www', not a very safe
> assumption with over 7,800 language codes.
It would be nice though if www could be permanently reserved if it is not needed. Perhaps John is right to request ftp too. However, I agree these codespaces are generally needed (until the advent of iso 639-6). I just can't see howver: www.docname.html.www  That looks strange to me but I guess it's probably rare to find such url's for wawa.
 
> Wawa speakers, like speakers of any other language, shouldn't be
> expected to know the magic two- or three-level code for their language.
> This is a matter for engineers. They are the ones who dropped the ball
> here.
>> We shouldn't be attacking websites for still supporting the use of
>> "www" as equal to the "naked" URL, which has been around for the whole
>> life of the internet. I don't mind "blacklisting" ftp too, but it's
>> not as necessary as "www". www is really the only thing that would be
>> a conflict with every single website that uses lang.foo.tld.
> I don't care if they want to make "www.wikipedia.org" equivalent to
>"wikipedia.org". Many, probably most, Web sites are like that. But
> then they should not have created "fr.wikipedia.org" and
"de.wikipedia.org" and such, with "fr" and "de" taking, as it were, the
> place of "www". They could have used "www.fr.wikipedia.org" or
>"wikipedia.org/fr/" and avoided the possible ambiguity which they are
> now facing.
Thanks for the info., Doug.
> Or, since they already make up codes when it suits them, they could use
> "wawa.wikipedia.org" for the Wawa version and be done with it.
I agree that no one is going to automatically think that either "www" or "wwx" stands for "wawa".
 
 
Best,
 
--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com 
>> [0] ...and not that it matters, but the language codes don't always
>> match for historical reasons, from before we used ISO or from before
>> ISO might have had codes for those languages. We're actually planning
>> on moving most of the wikis soon to match ISO, but it's a pretty
>> labor-intensive process so it's not something that's done every day.
> "We" implies that you are from Wikipedia, which I don't think was stated
> before.
> BTW, wikis that were created before ISO 639-3 existed could still have
> followed the BCP 47 architecture and syntax. It wasn't necessary to
> invent "simple" and "roa-tara" and "zh-classical" when conformant
> private-use tags could have been used instead.
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
> www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell ­
 		 	   		  
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