RE: draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, specifications, "stability", ?a

Bruce wrote:
---
No, you seem to have missed the point; there exist RFC 3066
implementations. Such implementations, using the RFC 3066 rules,
could match something like "sr-CS-Latn" to "sr-CS", but could
not match "sr-Latn-CS" to "sr-CS".  By changing the definition of
the interpretation of the second subtag, the proposed draft fails
to be compatible with existing deployed implementations (which is
what is meant by "backwards compatibility", which is a prime
consideration for Internet protocols).
---

No, your argument is flawed and wrong.

The draft does not change the "interpretation of the second subtag". The second 
subtag was never defined to be simply region subtags--although they sometimes 
are.

I quote the definition from RFC 3066:
---
   The following rules apply to the second subtag:

   - All 2-letter subtags are interpreted as ISO 3166 alpha-2 country
     codes from [ISO 3166], or subsequently assigned by the ISO 3166
     maintenance agency or governing standardization bodies, denoting
     the area to which this language variant relates.

   - Tags with second subtags of 3 to 8 letters may be registered with
     IANA, according to the rules in chapter 5 of this document.

   - Tags with 1-letter second subtags may not be assigned except after
     revision of this standard.

   There are no rules apart from the syntactic ones for the third and
   subsequent subtags.
---

The second subtag *could* be anything, but tags created under the generative 
mechanism defined two letter subtags following the primary language subtag to 
be region subtags based on ISO 3166. This doesn't change with the draft: 
two-letter subtags are still region tags from ISO 3166. We merely define four 
letter subtags to be the script subtag also and prescribe an order that the 
subtags must follow. This doesn't break ANY existing implementations, because 
while iIt is the case that "sr-Latn-CS" is not matched to "sr-CS" in existing 
implementations, neither is it matched by those based on the draft.

The draft does define some new sources and an order for subtags that existing 
implementations will not recognize, but this hardly breaks anything. Matching 
hasn't changed, so existing implementations won't be hurt by the insertion of 
script subtags between the two subtags (unless the matching was not compliant 
with RFC 3066 in the first place).

Regards,

Addison


Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
http://www.webMethods.com

Chair, W3C Internationalization Working Group
http://www.w3.org/International

Internationalization is an architecture. 
It is not a feature.



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