Subject: Re: [Ltru] Geocoordinates

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:31:36 -0600

Mark Davis <mark at macchiato dot com> wrote:

> It is not necessarily non-conformant. I could define a field as 
> follows:
>
>   - if it has 4 characters and no hyphen, it means X
>   - otherwise it is interpreted as a BCP 47 language tag.
>
> That is perfectly conformant usage of BCP 47, and would work with the 
> current spec. The disadvantage is that if BCP47 ever uses 4-letter 
> base language codes, then you can't represent the full range of BCP47 
> at that point. So you definitely take a risk in using such a 
> definition in terms of future compatibility, but such a definition is 
> not non-conformant.

That sounds to me somewhat like a field containing a 16-bit unsigned 
integer defined as follows:

 - if it is within the range 0x0880 through 0x08FF, it is a message ID
 - otherwise it is interpreted as a UTF-16 code unit

on the basis that no Unicode characters between U+0880 and U+08FF are 
currently assigned.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
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