[webfinger] Language tag too specific (Was: Last Call: <draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-10.txt> (WebFinger) to Proposed Standard

["Martin J. Dürst"]

On 2013/03/16 1:02, Mike Jones wrote:
> I'll raise a related issue - the case of characters used in language tag values.  Given that "en-us" and "en-US" are different JSON values, it's important for people to spell language tag values in a consistent way.

Hello Mike,

Language tags are case-insensitive, so whether it says "en-US" or 
"en-us" (or any other combination of caps and lower case), the final 
result (that those people who prefer English as used in the US get to 
see the title version that's labeled "en-US" or "en-us") should be the same.

Of course, it might be that there are two separate titles with match 
case-insensitively. Here's an example:

"titles" :
             {
                 "en-us" : "The Magical Theater of Bob",
                 "en-gb" : "The magical theatre of Bob",
                 "en-GB" : "The Magical Theatre of Bob",
                 "fr" : "Le Théâtre Magique de Bob"
             }

While the author might have intended for the user to select the lower 
case or the titlecase version of the title, that just won't work. So I 
guess we should call out this case and prohibit it for producers.

But I don't see the reason to specify that everybody has to use "en-GB"; 
using "en-gb" only should just do as well.

Regards,   Martin.

> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646#section-2.1.1 makes specific recommendations. We should probably call them out - in particular, that tag elements SHOULD be spelled as in the IANA registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry.
>
> In the case of US English used in the example, the recommended spelling appears to be "en-US".
>
> 				-- Mike
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: webfinger-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:webfinger-bounces at ietf.org] On Behalf Of Stephane Bortzmeyer
> Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 8:19 AM
> To: webfinger at ietf.org
> Cc: ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
> Subject: [webfinger] Language tag too specific (Was: Last Call:<draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-10.txt>  (WebFinger) to Proposed Standard
>
> Another issue with language tags in draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-11.txt:
>
>> "titles" :
>>            {
>>                "en-us" : "The Magical World of Bob",
>>                "fr" : "Le Monde Magique de Bob"
>>            }
>
> I understand that the purpose of the example is to show that you are not limited to the primary langauge subtag, you can add other subtags (here, the region "us"). But the example is not well chosen. RFC 5646 says:
>
>>       Use as precise a tag as possible, but no more specific than is
>>       justified.  Avoid using subtags that are not important for
>>       distinguishing content in an application.
>>
>>        * For example, 'de' might suffice for tagging an email written
>>           in German, while "de-CH-1996" is probably unnecessarily
>>           precise for such a task.
>
> Which seems to apply exactly here (there is nothing US-specific in the sentence). May be, instead:
>
> "titles" :
>             {
>                 "en-us" : "The Magical Theater of Bob",
>                 "en-gb" : "The Magical Theatre of Bob",
>                 "fr" : "Le Théâtre Magique de Bob"
>             }
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