Subject: [Ltru] additional changes...

From: "Addison Phillips" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:37:52 -0700

In making the changes proposed by Ira (or myself, in response to Ira), I also made minor modifications to the section on choice of language tag (moving a small amount of material there from length considerations).

Finally, I added a short description for each subtag type in the section on syntax, as pointed out in a recent thread. These probably bear a look as innovations.

All of these are now posted on the inter-locale site:

http://www.inter-locale.com/ID/draft-ietf-ltru-registry-06.html
http://www.inter-locale.com/ID/draft-ietf-ltru-registry-06.txt

Any more comments?

Best Regards,

Addison

Addison P. Phillips
Globalization Architect, Quest Software
http://www.quest.com

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

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture. 

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: "John.Cowan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 16:33:28 -0400

Addison Phillips scripsit:

> Finally, I added a short description for each subtag type in the
> section on syntax, as pointed out in a recent thread. These probably
> bear a look as innovations.

A very minor nit.  Bullet point 4 in section 2.2.2 currently reads:

	Extended language subtags will not be registered except by
	revision of this document.

I suggest that "by" be changed to "pursuant to" or "as a consequence of",
to avoid the perception that each such subtag will require a revision of the
document.

-- 
A witness cannot give evidence of his           John Cowan
age unless he can remember being born.          [email-masked]
  --Judge Blagden                               http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 22:42:37 +0200

> Any more comments?

Looking at it only for some minutes, I still like it.  The
new "symrefs" are much better, you even went to the trouble 
of creating nice anchors like RFC2234bis etc. in explicitly
defined references (instead of using the bibxml anchor).

                    Bye, Frank

---

From: r&d afrac <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 23:24:27 +0200

At 21:37 23/06/2005, Addison Phillips wrote:
>Finally, I added a short description for each subtag type in the section 
>on syntax, as pointed out in a recent thread. These probably bear a look 
>as innovations.

Certainly a good thing. But I am afraid this does not address the lack of 
definition of what all this is about and what is a langtag. Let me try to 
clarifiy in using ISO 3166. ISO 3166 is seven different ways to code the 
name of the countries. You use the ISO 3166 for something else (you name it 
a region and you mix M.49). The same as Jon Postel used it to designated 
ccTLDs. You must define somewhere what you are defining with that code.

For example, nothing could prevent us in this WG to call one another by our 
organisation's name. I would call you Quest. etc. But if we do not define 
it, no one will know if I refer to you or to your organisation or to its 
boss, etc.

If I am correct (but I did not look in detail), ISO 3166 codes define the 
name of  the countries. ISO 639-3 are just codes and autonyms or english 
names are attached to them. ISO15924 is a list and I am not sure anyone 
knows what a script can exactly be (not clear in the text and in Michael's 
references to it: usually discussed as a reference to the Unicode 
script.txt file). All this is not ISO 11179 conformant because a metamodel 
must be homogenous and ... clear. ISO 639-4 tries to relate them. This 
would be a good thing. But we do not know yet if it will, and how.

Why is important? Because this permits to describe what a langtag is about. 
Charter says that the Draft must follow ISO. If you define something which 
looks homogenous (you did not do it yet, but you certainly could), but 
which is not in tune with ISO we will have sometimes, somewhere a conflict. 
This may seem remote and unimportant to you today. The same as it was 
remote and unimportant for Harald to define scripts. Sometimes this will be 
a big conflict. All the more than you do not protect yourself in the 
introduction in specifying a restricted/defined scope. And want to be a BCP 47.

One of the major discrepancy you face is about "script", because you are 
specifying "langtag" for a multimedia system and use two general attributes 
(languages and country) and a specialised one (script) making yourself 
incompatible with all the non written modes. To correct that it is enough 
to coin an open description of "script" as the descriptor of the mode, 
using ISO 15924 when it is a written mode.

All this is not complex, but must be done precisely. In an ISO consistent 
way, because the charter says so.
jfc

---

From: Erkki Kolehmainen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 17:14:26 +0300

Dear Mr. Morfin,

You are so right with your statement "I am not sure anyone knows what a 
script can exactly be." - E.g., there are people who insist that 
Phoenician is not a script, but rather a glyph variation of Hebrew, and 
consequently they would like to prohibit the encoding of Phoenician 
characters in ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode. In spite (and because) of 
quarrels like this, defining the script used for the encoding is often 
useful. Also, a text may be English, but if it is written and encoded in 
Shavian instead of the Latin script, it would be totally useless for me 
- among many others - to even open the file. One could argue that if the 
text would be rendered e.g. as generated voice, the identification of 
the chosen script together with the language is redundant - in 
principle, but not quite in practice. I suspect that no voice generator 
would work on encodings in both Shavian and Latin scripts or, to be more 
practical, e.g. in Cyrillic and Latin scripts, both of which are used 
for a number of languages even in the same countries (often together 
with other orthographic differences, though).

The countries and regions of this world are not defined with absolute 
precision or optimal granularity, either. Yet, since there is 
considerable local variation in nearly all languages, it is often useful 
to define the applicable region using the most suitable code.

The fact that there can be no absolute precision in the definitions of 
either the languages, scripts or regions, should not prevent us from 
coming up with a practical solution to the problems at hand.

Sincerely,

Erkki I. Kolehmainen

r&d afrac wrote:

> Certainly a good thing. But I am afraid this does not address the lack 
> of definition of what all this is about and what is a langtag. Let me 
> try to clarifiy in using ISO 3166. ISO 3166 is seven different ways to 
> code the name of the countries. You use the ISO 3166 for something else 
> (you name it a region and you mix M.49). The same as Jon Postel used it 
> to designated ccTLDs. You must define somewhere what you are defining 
> with that code.
> 
> For example, nothing could prevent us in this WG to call one another by 
> our organisation's name. I would call you Quest. etc. But if we do not 
> define it, no one will know if I refer to you or to your organisation or 
> to its boss, etc.
> 
> If I am correct (but I did not look in detail), ISO 3166 codes define 
> the name of  the countries. ISO 639-3 are just codes and autonyms or 
> english names are attached to them. ISO15924 is a list and I am not sure 
> anyone knows what a script can exactly be (not clear in the text and in 
> Michael's references to it: usually discussed as a reference to the 
> Unicode script.txt file). All this is not ISO 11179 conformant because a 
> metamodel must be homogenous and ... clear. ISO 639-4 tries to relate 
> them. This would be a good thing. But we do not know yet if it will, and 
> how.
> 
> Why is important? Because this permits to describe what a langtag is 
> about. Charter says that the Draft must follow ISO. If you define 
> something which looks homogenous (you did not do it yet, but you 
> certainly could), but which is not in tune with ISO we will have 
> sometimes, somewhere a conflict. This may seem remote and unimportant to 
> you today. The same as it was remote and unimportant for Harald to 
> define scripts. Sometimes this will be a big conflict. All the more than 
> you do not protect yourself in the introduction in specifying a 
> restricted/defined scope. And want to be a BCP 47.
> 
> specifying "langtag" for a multimedia system and use two general 
> attributes (languages and country) and a specialised one (script) making 
> yourself incompatible with all the non written modes. To correct that it 
> is enough to coin an open description of "script" as the descriptor of 
> the mode, using ISO 15924 when it is a written mode.
> 
> All this is not complex, but must be done precisely. In an ISO 
> consistent way, because the charter says so.
> jfc
> 
>