Subject: Re: [Ltru] A radical proposal (was: Re: extlang & deprecation)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 19:12:12 -0600

Shawn Steele <Shawn dot Steele at microsoft dot com> wrote:

> Re: Deprecated.
>
> I happen to work for a large company that regularly gets "beat up" in 
> the media for not using the preferred forms of standards.  Those doing 
> the ranting usually don't care if there is a "good reason" or not for 
> using the non-preferred form.  They also aren't going to bother with 
> minor details like reading the definition of a well-known term like 
> "deprecated".

This is the point I was trying to make about our terminology, but maybe 
Shawn's real-world perspective will help lend it some more serious 
consideration.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Arvada, Colorado, 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: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 19:19:53 -0600

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> 2.  Define all of the Y forms (e.g. "cmn") in the Registry as Type: 
>> extlang, none as Type: language.  Bear with me here.
>
> Presumably this is meant to exclude the ones which are already in as 
> languages?  I don't think we want to allow sh-bos, for example.

I did not mean to add this type of situation to the mix, where X-Y is 
equivalent to Z.  We would want to exclude the languages that already 
have two-letter subtags.  This is a cherry-pick for a sound syntactical 
reason.

> More seriously, though, it breaks the invariant that the syntactic 
> slot "language" is filled only with "language" subtags.  Currently 
> this invariant applies to all four kinds of subtags, and I think it's 
> an important part of Getting It Right for people who haven't read all 
> the fine print: once you clear away the grandfathered rubbish, you can 
> just take the Cartesian product of the four lists of subtags as a 
> rough guide to validity.

This is true.

> I would rather keep -16's scheme than this, frankly.

Fair enough.  Hey, at least the conversation got started.

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From: Shawn Steele <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 18:29:46 -0700

A suggestion (which is a pain I realize) would be that if "deprecated" doesn't really mean "deprecated", that we change the term to describe what it does mean (like "alias" or something)

Also in my view the existing deprecated values that are quite odd (i-klingon), should be deprecated in the true "deprecated" sense, not in the "alias" sense.

- Shawn