RE: draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, sp ecifications, "stability", and extensions
2005-01-06 13:08:23
At 11:34 AM -0800 1/6/05, Peter Constable wrote:
> From: Dave Singer [mailto:singer(_at_)apple(_dot_)com]
>This is similar to the reason why the language code comes before the
country
>code. If we had the order CH-fr, then we could end up mixing French
and
>German in the same page, because we would fall back (for one of the
data
>sources) from CH-fr to CH, which could be German.
It has to be application-specific which fallback happens. If the
user says he's swiss french, and the the content has alternative
offers for swiss german or french french, which do you present? If
the content actually differs for legal or geographic reasons ('the
legal representative in your country is', 'for copyright reasons this
edition differs in material ways from other countries'), then the
correct country but wrong language is the best answer. If the desire
is simply for maximum intelligibility, then the reverse is true.
But that is a level of decision making that goes well beyond any
algorithm that simply uses truncation of tags, which is the only case in
which the ordering of sub-tags matters.
Sorry, I should have gone on to conclude: the important aspect of
sub-tags is that their nature and purpose be identifiable and
explained (e.g. that this is a country code), and that we retain
compatibility with previous specifications. This tagging uses order
(and size) of sub-tags rather than explicit labels to say what
something is, and we're stuck with that. I don't believe that simple
truncation is a necessarily useful operation in all circumstances,
and it probably should not be in the spec. at all. For example, I'd
say that we should retain the 3066 ordering of language-country and
therefore script, if needed, comes later. However, my typesetting
subsystem doesn't care a jot about language or country, it just needs
to find the script code ('can I render this script'?).
This spec. should unambiguously allow me to extract the language,
country, script etc., should say under what circumstances two
sub-tags of any type match, state the obvious that two tags exactly
match if they have the same sub-tags and they all match, that partial
perfect matches (of tags with differing numbers of sub-tags) are
possible and may be applicable, and that the use of imperfect matches
(in which not all sub-tags match) has to be application-specific.
Examples of why on the latter would be helpful.
--
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime
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