Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> wrote on 2004-12-12 T 18:44:27 -0500
(...)
RFC 1766 (and 3066) leave you little choice; if you wish
to indicate a region, you either have to do it with ISO
639 codes or you have to register a separate tag (no
separate tag for German as spoken in Alsace exists). Never
mind the shortcomings of that particular example; consider
"de-DE" -- does that mean Germany as it exists today, West
Germany as it existed 25 years ago, Germany as it existed
in the 1930s, the 1900s, ...?
As far as I can tell, this is about about /language/ tags, not about the
tagging of borders or nationalities.
These last two have certainly influence on the use of language, but should not
on the name and tagging of the language itself. Unless there is some forced
change of language, which needs to be reflected in tagging.
(...)
On the contrary, it is preposterous to suggest that codes
will be attached to text by magic; some human somewhere,
somehow is going to have to indicate the language to
something,
Tagging may also be done by some software instead of a human being.
Whether you consider that "magic" is up to you, but I think both ways of
finding a tag for a given text are possible.
and it certainly isn't going to be by way of
a 2- or 3-letter code without some reference to what those
codes *mean*.
I beg to differ. Many humans do not know the lists, not even their name, and
yet they use the codes on a daily basis. They simply recall the codes they've
seen and found relevant to them, like the TLD ones they are used to; or they
are told by somebody "use this tag when using language A and that tag when
using language B". This information may be wrong or outdated, of course.
Please do not assume tags will be assigned only by humans who have a recent
list of the code(s) at hand.
Just my 0.02?.
Best regards,
J. Wilkes
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