I forwarded the language tags draft to Mark Davis, the International
architect here at Taligent (and president of the Unicode consortium), and
he gave me the following comments I'm forwarding to this list:
Date: 4 Jan 1995 18:44:16 -0800
From: "Mark Davis" <mark_davis(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com>
Subject: Re: Last Call- Tags for the
To: "David Goldsmith" <david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com>,
john_jenkins(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com,
lee_collins(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com,
mark_davis(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com
Reply to: RE>Last Call: Tags for the identification of... 01/04/95 6:35
PM
I looked it over, and the only comment I have is that ISO-639 and ISO-3166
are unfortunately unsteady foundations, since they retract or change codes.
Unless you have an associated date/version number codes that are valid now
may become invalid in the future, thus invalidating the data that contains
them.
Mark
I have to agree that the fact that ISO retracts or changes country codes
could cause a problem with using those codes as tags in MIME data. It would
be better to use something that, once registered, would not be retracted or
redefined.
----------------------------
David Goldsmith
david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com
Senior Scientist
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233