Gunnar replied:
Den 2017-02-14 kl. 21:39, skrev Phillips, Addison:
I have some allergy to the SHALL language: there is no way to automatically
determine conformance. Many language tags represent nonsensical values, due
to the nature of language tag composition. Content providers need to use care
in selecting the tags that they use and this section is merely pointing out
good
guidance for tag selection, albeit in a heavy-handed way. BCP47 RFC 5646
Section 4.1 [1] already provides most of this guidance and a reference to that
source might be useful here, if only because that document requires it:
<quote>
Standards, protocols, and applications that reference this document
normatively but apply different rules to the ones given in this
section MUST specify how language tag selection varies from the
guidelines given here.
</quote>
I would suggest reducing the SHALL items to SHOULD.
Accepted.
That also opens up for another use we have discussed before but been advised
to not use. That is to indicate use of written language by attaching a script
subtag even if the script subtag we use is suppressed by BCP 47. We can dro
that
need however, with the use of the Zxxx script subtag for non-written, and
clearly
include that usage in our specification as required from BCP 47.
I don't necessarily think that mandating a script subtag as a signal of written
content (vs. spoken content) is that useful. In most protocols, the written
nature of the content is indicated by the presence of text. Trying to coerce
the language modality via language tags seems complicated, especially since
most language tags are harvested from the original source. Introducing
processes to evaluate and insert or remove script subtags seems unnecessary to
me. That said, I have no objection to content using script subtags if they are
useful.
I'm not sure what #2 really means. Shouldn't text captions be indicated by
the
written language rather than the spoken language? And I'm not sure what
"spoken/written language" means.
#2 was: "
2. Text captions included in the video stream SHALL be indicated
by a Language-Tag for spoken/written language."
Yes, the intention is to use written language in the video stream. There are
technologies for that.
I'm aware of that. My concern is that in this case "spoken/written" is applied
to "text captions", which are not spoken be definition? This section is talking
about the differences between identifying spoken and written language. The text
captions fall into the written side of the equation, no?
I'd probably prefer to see something like "2. Text captions included in the
video stream SHOULD include a Language-Tag to identify the language."
Since the language subtags in the IANA registry are combined for spoken
languages and written languages, I call them Language-Tags for spoken/written
language.
The language subtags are for languages--all modalities. My comment here is that
"spoken/written" adds no information.
It would be misleading to say that we use a Language-Tag for a written
language, because the same tag could in another context mean a spoken
language.
One uses a Language-Tag for indicating the language. When the text is written,
sometimes the user will pick a different language tag (zh-Hant-HK) than they
might choose for spoken text (yue-HK, zh-cmn-HK, etc.). Sometimes (actually,
nearly all the time except for special cases) the language tag for the spoken
and written language is the same tag (en-US, de-CH, ja-JP, etc.). Again, the
modality of the language is a separate consideration from the language. Nearly
always, it is better to use the same tag for both spoken and written content
rather than trying to use the tag to distinguish between them: different
Content-Types require different decoders anyway, but it is really useful to say
"give me all of the 'en-US' content you have" or "do you have content for a
user who speaks 'es'"
Since we have the script subtag Zxxx for non-written, we do not need to
construct an explicit tag for the written language tag, it should be
sufficient with
our specification of the use in our case.
In case it isn't clear aboe, I oppose introducing the 'Zxxx' subtag save for
cases where the non-written nature of the content is super-important to the
identification of the language.
In my latest recent proposal, I still have a very similar wording. Since you
had
problems understanding it, there might still be a need to tune it. Can you
propose wording?
This is the current proposal:
" 2. Text captions included in the video stream SHOULD be indicated
by a humintlang attribute with Language-Tag for spoken/written language.
"
I did that above. I think it is useful not to over-think it. When I see
"Content-Type: video/mpeg; Content-Language: en-GB", I rather expect audio
content in English and not written content (although the video stream might
also includes pictures of English text such as the titles in a movie). When, as
in this case, setting up a negotiated language experience, interoperability is
most aided by matching the customer's language preferences to available
resources. This is easiest when customers do not get carried away with complex
language tags (ranges in BCP 47 parlance, e.g. tlh-Cyrl-AQ-fonupa) and systems
do not have to introspect the language tags, inserting and removing script
subtags to match the various language modes.
Addison