ietf-822
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Re: A spec for showing language in MIME headers

1993-11-11 14:38:17
David writes:

A criticism I read of the OSI/ISO/CCITT process is once they define some
stuff for a particular area they start defining stuff for mildly related
areas in which they do not have expertise.

This discussion about linguistic details, language markings, language
representation, and how we can tag everything is very interesting.

However is it something which this group has a high degree of expertise in? 
I have *some* knowledge in this area but cannot call it `expertise' as the
last course work was 5+ years ago.

No, probably not. Therefore my proposal is the following:

-- Leave the specialists' needs to the specialists. TEI (The 
   Text Encoding Initiative) seems to be the most promising 
   effort to cater for these needs. We should be prepared to 
   register content-types suitable for TEI-encoded text.

-- Make the existing, well-established ISO 639 standard usable 
   in the Content-Language: header field.

-- Prepare for accepting also the future improved three-letter 
   codes, when the new ISO standard eventuelly is adopted.

-- In the meantime, allow IANA registration of additional, 
   hopefully temporary language codes and variant codes, when 
   they are needed. This does _not_ imply that IETF has to 
   decide on the appropriateness of any individual code, and 
   even less that IETF has to design an all-embracing _system_ 
   of language codes.

/Olle