Subject: [Ltru] Re: Proposed note on well-formed but not valid language tags

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 10:01:21 -0800

Addison Phillips <addison at yahoo dash inc dot com> replied to Debbie 
Garside:

>> Language tags may be well formed in terms of syntax but not valid in
>> terms of content. Users MUST NOT assign and use their own subtags, 
>> other
>> than private use codes as designated within the underlying standards, 
>> as
>> they may find an as yet unassigned subtag may be officially assigned 
>> at
>> a later date with a different meaning.
>
> I agree with the sentiment but think some editing is in order. 
> Notably,
> the private use codes you mention are in the registry, while what I 
> had
> in mind were -x- type private use sequences. Also: I think we have
> similar text elsewhere in the document and would like to look at the
> whole and see what makes the most sense.

I don't see why the private-use subtags in the Registry wouldn't be at 
least as appropriate as the x-type sequences for this and other uses. 
They do have the advantage that you can parse them and figure out 
syntactically what kind of entity they represent:

qaa  -- definitely some language
nl-Qaaa  -- definitely Dutch written in some script
nl-AA  -- definitely Dutch as used in some region
nl-x-ongeacht  -- can't tell what kind of entity "ongeacht" is

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

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---

From: Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:44:32 -0800

Doug Ewell wrote:
>>> terms of content. Users MUST NOT assign and use their own subtags, other
>>> than private use codes as designated within the underlying standards, as
>>> they may find an as yet unassigned subtag may be officially assigned at
>> I agree with the sentiment but think some editing is in order. Notably,
>> the private use codes you mention are in the registry, while what I had

I didn't say that they weren't. What I said was: those private use codes 
are in the registry, while Debbie's suggested text suggests otherwise 
(and makes no mention of -x private use sequences). Both are valid ways 
of "assigning and using" one's own subtags. Both need to be recommended 
in their proper place.

> syntactically what kind of entity they represent:

Agreed. I think Mark and I (and you) were making that argument a year or 
two ago :-).

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:30:54 +0900

I think Addison's comment was purely editorial: Because things such as
qaa are in the registry, they are not "their own subtags". They are
private use semantically, but they are not just made up because they
are in the registry, and this new text is warning about 'just made
up' stuff.

Semantically, of course you know that qaa is a language and so on,
but with x-, there are many more subtags available for distinction,
and it may be possible to use words that at least to the tagger
actually mean something, which makes handling quite a bit easier.

Regards,   Martin.

At 03:01 08/01/20, Doug Ewell wrote:
>Addison Phillips <addison at yahoo dash inc dot com> replied to Debbie Garside:
>
>I don't see why the private-use subtags in the Registry wouldn't be at least as appropriate as the x-type sequences for this and other uses. They do have the advantage that you can parse them and figure out syntactically what kind of entity they represent:
>
>http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  〓
>
>
>

#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[email-masked]