Subject: [Ltru] Re: Solving the UTF-8 problem

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2007 19:19:40 -0700

I noticed that the Web-based LTRU mail archives bungled my UTF-8 
mailing --which once again is an e-mail problem and not a UTF-8 problem per 
se -- so I'm re-posting a fragment, this time in ISO 8859-1.

> What are we going to do when the ISO 639-3 code list is finalized and we 
> have to deal with adding the following pairs of languages, whose names 
> differ only by diacritical marks?
>
> aru  Arua
> arx  Aruá
>
> bfa  Bari
> mot  Barí
>
> kgm  Karipúna
> kuq  Karipuná
>
> sbe  Saliba
> slc  Sáliba
>
> wbf  Wara
> tci  Wára

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

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---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2007 22:08:14 -0700

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> I still think the email argument is the compelling one.  We *will* 
> have corruption no matter what.

My suggestion is that we send new and changed records to IANA in UTF-8, 
as file attachments, possibly zipped or gzipped or wrapped in some other 
sort of binary armor to help protect against damage.  I'm not worried 
about that part; I haven't received a corrupted GIF or JPEG sent that 
way in 10 years.

The part I'm not sure about is convincing the list that the record 
submitted to IANA, in this high-security way, is the exact same as the 
one list members have agreed upon.  This is a bit touchy because of the 
two recent submissions whose Comments fields were altered before being 
sent to IANA.  I'm sure we can come up with a solution that will satisfy 
almost everyone; I'm just not sure what that solution will be.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:13:20 -0700

+1.
But you knew that.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:54:46 -0700

Randy Presuhn <randy underscore presuhn at mindspring dot com> wrote:

> There appears to be an emerging consensus that having UTF-8 in the 
> registry would make sense.  Before we can claim to have completed this 
> item, however, we should identify and get agreement on updated text 
> for 4646bis to make it so, as well as any additional instructions for 
> the conversion and "bulk update" of the registry itself.

I agree, though I don't think it will be hard to figure out which 
changes are related to UTF-8 and which are not.

I am waiting for three things before I can update 
draft-ietf-ltru-4645bis-01, which is set to expire in less than a week:

1. The results of the current round of changes to ISO 639-3, scheduled 
to be published in the next few days.

2. A resolution on the question of whether to use extlangs or not.

3. A resolution on the UTF-8 question.

While I can issue more than one draft in succession, just as Addison and 
Mark can, it seems we ought to be able to address these last few issues 
soon, considering that our charter page still has both drafts scheduled 
to go to IETF Last Call by January 2007.

> The devil is frequently in the details, so we can't declare consensus 
> here until we've worked throught the rest of the exorcise.

At which point we can exorcise the devil?