Hello Mark,
Regarding hreflang - looking through the history, it's been discussed
in a fairly positive light a few times, but never made it in. I think
it does make some sense, since it's both in Atom and HTML.
I think hreflang would be useful to add. You might want to consider calling it
just 'lang', since that locution is more familiar.
I think you might want to make it more than a single language tag. The purpose
of http-link-header is to provide metadata about a link in addition to the URI.
This is more like providing the author's intended target audience rather than
the document processing language. That is, it's like the Content-Language
header and/or <meta> element, rather than like the <html> lang attribute. Cf.
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-http-and-lang#answer
I'm a bit
concerned about what the appropriate reference is for the value space;
ATM I'm thinking BCP47 directly, rather than to a specific RFC, to
allow it to evolve*.
Although there is a new RFC-to-be (4646bis) now in the RFC-editor's pipeline, I
rather think that future changes to BCP 47 will tend to be limited to the
production of extensions defined by 4646/4646bis, rather than changes to the
grammar of language tags. There are some people who think that a revision might
happen to use some reserved subtags for ISO 639-6 if/when that standard reaches
maturity, so the possibility of revision does remain.
...
* Often, a reference to an RFC is preferable, so that software can be
reliably written to a specific set of identifiers. My initial feeling
is that here that's not appropriate to do that, because language tags
are labels, not something that you're going to hardcode into
infrastructure software. Feedback appreciated, especially from the
i18n community.
Language tags are, as you note, labels that should not be hardcoded into
infrastructure. However, BCP 47 defines the grammar for language tags
themselves. Implementers need a reference to determine if the list of language
tags they generate or receive is well-formed or not. That might be a good
reason for a specific reference. Otherwise, I tend to recommend that people
reference BCP 47 (it avoids that old chestnut "RFC WXYZ or its successor").
Best Regards,
Addison
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126
Chair -- W3C Internationalization WG
Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf