Language subtag registration for acor1990 (amended from ao1990)

Phillips, Addison addison at lab126.com
Fri Aug 26 18:33:20 CEST 2011


> We've used '1901' and '1996' for German and '1994' for the Resian dialect of
> Slovenian, and the sky hasn't fallen.  Maybe that is the most sensible model to
> follow.  If we feel we must add letters to clarify what the year means, let's at
> least decide whether the letters should precede the year (like 'alalc97'  and
> 'baku1926' and 'luna1918' and
> 'petr1708') or follow it (like '1606nict' and '1694acad' and '1959acad'), and
> let's stick to that one convention instead of switching back and forth.

I tend to prefer the letters-followed-by-date convention (luna1918) over the other flavor. Although we have date-only subtags, registering more might be problematic in that there is a relatively narrow number of years and eventually two languages will make (or be "discovered" to have made) some important-to-tag (but unrelated) change in the same year. That would, indeed, be confusing for users (there are two subtags: '1994' and 'xx1994'??)

Note: in practice, these kinds of subtags are rarely used and should be rarely used. In this case, in nearly all cases "pt" or one of the regional variations (pt-BR, pt-PT) will continue to be the best choice for identifying Portuguese content. I agree that the requester has a need to register subtags (he needs to identify specific spelling and text processing options for Portuguese). That doesn't mean that these subtags should be widely used.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect (Lab126)
Chair (W3C I18N WG)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.




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