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Re: Language tags and 10646

1993-03-08 12:29:50
In <731604373(_dot_)826006(_dot_)KLENSIN(_at_)INFOODS(_dot_)UNU(_dot_)EDU>, 
John wrote:
[I had written:]
    1. What percentage of e-mail messages will require full
     multilingual capabilities, and
I think the answers are "high" ...

I don't believe it...

Urk.  I don't believe it, either.  I managed to mis-answer my own
question; I actually meant "low."  I won't argue, however, with
Nathaniel's suggestion that the percentage of truly multilingual
e-mail in some countries may be much higher.

[On whether the language tag should permit a list:]

   But suppose I am sending a message that is mixed English and Russian,
mostly the latter.  Cyrillic isn't unified with Roman in either 10646 or
in 8859-5.  But, if I am forced to "one language", I either have to lie
and say "English" to get the disambiguations of your example, or I have
to say "Russian" and lose all of those disambiguations (although not 
the ability to differentiate between Russian and other Cyrillic-using
Slavic languages, perhaps).

An even better example, which occurred to me after I had sent my
note yesterday, would be a message which contained both English
and Japanese: language-based distinctions based on each language
could be unambiguously applied to the Latin and Han characters,
respectively, in the message.

I withdraw my objection to permitting a list of languages.
(In the general case, permitting a list is often a good idea,
anyway).  We should make sure, however, that the description
emphasizes the fact that text/plain messages with tags like
"English,German" or "Japanese,Chinese" are probably *not* going
to be disambiguated appropriately.

                                        Steve Summit
                                        scs(_at_)adam(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu

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