Subject: [Ltru] Re: [psg.com #950] iso 3166 inadequate for regional variants

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 22:44:40 -0700

> This comes from comment 22 in
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00540.html
> which states:
>
> "22. 2.2.4: I understand that all the regional language differences of
> the world are to be supported by the ISO 3166 alpha-3/digit-3 list.
> This means that regions like NY, TX or California are not entitled a
> code but the 56 persons of Pitcairn Island yes? I doubt that disparity
> can hold very long, all the more than ISO 3166-2 provides all the
> possibilities for a far more adequate granularity."
>
> As pointed out in message
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00628.html
> the draft also supports UN M.49 digit-3 codes
>
> Based on recent discussion, can I close this with a "reject"?

I agree to reject.  But I think this one needs some comment, since I was
once a supporter of ISO 3166-2 in language tags, and have often cited
regional differences in en-US as potentially worthy of tagging.

Neither ISO 3166-2 nor any other geographic coding system -- UN/LOCODE,
MARC 21, FIPS 10-4, HASC, any of them -- can partition the world
perfectly and unequivocally in terms of language variation, partly
because experts will never agree completely on what constitutes a
"significant" language variation, and partly because such systems never
guarantee equality as to the area or population of the encoded regions.

ISO 3166-2 assigns a single code to California (population 33 million)
and another to New York state (population 19 million), but it also
assigns 21 codes to the Bahamas (population 303,000) -- one for each of
the pre-1996 districts.  This is far from ideal in terms of providing
consistent coding granularity.  Other geocoding systems have similar
limitations.

ISO 3166-2 also suffers from inadequate stability for the type of
tagging mechanism described in the draft.  Code elements are added,
removed, and changed (both description and code element) with little or
no publicity.  Occasionally the entire subdivision structure on which
ISO 3166-2 code elements are based is thrown out and replaced with a new
one; this happened with Libya in 2003 and Slovenia in 2002.

Variant subtags can always be proposed to distinguish regional
differences in language that cannot be described adequately with ISO
3166-1 and UN M.49 region subtags.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
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https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 22:48:45 -0700

> Comments 45 and 53 in message
> raise the question of supporting language, country, and region
> codes not maintained by ISO.

I propose rejecting this item.

Language subtags can be registered in the unlikely event that the
various flavors of ISO 639 completely miss a language.  Variant subtags
can be registered to capture scripts or regions that are inexplicably
not covered by ISO 15924, ISO 3166, or UN M.49.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 22:52:20 -0700

This proposal should be rejected.  In addition, the accusations of
treachery and skulduggery are completely uncalled for.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 22:53:20 -0700

> There was no support for this proposal, so it is marked "rejected."

I agree.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 22:58:07 -0700

> Comment 25 in message
> says:  "25. 2.3: recommendation 3 seems inappropriate. Aliases are
> aliases. All the
> aliases must be equally supported because (a) they are aliases (b) to
> make
> sure developers develops correct code."
>
> Discussion clarified that the intent is
> "All aliases are equally supported.  Not all aliases are equally
> recommended."
> see http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00628.html

I agree with the clarified intent.  Tag parsers must recognize all
aliases as equivalent.  Tag generators, however, may be required to
generate canonical subtags rather than aliases.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 22:59:15 -0700

Reject, reject, reject.

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 10:46:40 +0200

Doug Ewell wrote:

> the accusations of treachery and skulduggery are completely
> uncalled for.

What are you talking about ?  You haven't quoted any context,
and I don't find the Message-ID in the References:

<[email-masked]>

Outlook isn't suited for Internet usage, but this References
issue must be something else, a broken gateway somewhere (?)

                        Puzzled, Frank

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 08:35:00 -0400

> and I don't find the Message-ID in the References:

See http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg01571.html ,
which quotes the relevant bit of
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00540.html .

-- 
John Cowan       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        <[email-masked]>
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  `Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 15:57:17 +0200

John Cowan wrote:

> See
> http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg01571.html

Tnx, the (quote) "disguised way, concerted with ISO, to block
names" (unquote).  For more "fun" see the general IETF list:

<http://mid.gmane.org/[email-masked]>

Fortunately Randy commented this [***] before I had a chance
to post an article about the resident [***] in every WG, and
that it could be worse.
                         Bye, Frank

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 14:42:25 +0200

>Reject, reject, reject.

Great.

Then please stop this "Doug Ewell wrote:" computer originated script.
In case you did not bother to read the comment ill quoted by Randy, this is 
what you reject^3.
jfc

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 14:36:46 +0200

>I propose rejecting this item.

Good!
A part from opposing the charter, it definitly deprecates this WG proposition.
This clarifies the issue.

FYI there are three international standardisation organisations, where ISO 
if for everything but Electricity and Communications. We will therefore be 
able to resort to ITU standards.

>Language subtags can be registered in the unlikely event that the various 
>flavors of ISO 639 completely miss a language.  Variant subtags can be 
>registered to capture scripts or regions that are inexplicably not covered 
>by ISO 15924, ISO 3166, or UN M.49.

Most of the used charsets (sorry, "scripts") in use and part of the 
Internet world are not documented by ISO 19524.
jfc

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 14:55:30 +0200

>http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00540.html .

This does not document "treachery and skulduggery". I see that you use your 
professional mailname and have no footer indicating this is a private 
position. If this is an official company position this is an interesting 
piece of news. As you know I favor IETF Members exposure and recognition 
through a better press coverage, because I sincerely hope it would prevent 
that kind of wording. But if this is a dominant company political attitude, 
it conforts some prior assesments that some have sided motivations. We are 
to live with it. But we do not forget it.
jfc

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 14:38:18 +0200

>treachery and skulduggery are completely uncalled for.

??? document this please.

jfc

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 16:59:28 +0200

This is why I work on a stabilisation of E.164. The problem of 
stabilisation is however not really important if there is a good support of 
the versions of a standard, what is obviously not what Mark and Addison 
have in mind from their recent responses.

E.164 has several advantages:
- it is network oriented
- area codes are highly granular and documented
- it is population oriented as more and more people get a phone or a 
mobile, even in difficult countries like Ertihrea

... and we work on a reference grid which will address this which makes me 
biaised.
jfc

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 11:19:32 -0400

> Internet world are not documented by ISO 19524.

Charsets and scripts are distinct concepts.  Charsets are encodings of
characters into octets.  Scripts are collections of characters used in
writing systems, and have no connection with encoding.  ISO 8859-1 and
Win-1252 are charsets.  Latin, Greek, and Cherokee are scripts.

-- 
I don't know half of you half as well           John Cowan
as I should like, and I like less than half     [email-masked]
of you half as well as you deserve.             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --Bilbo                                 http://www.reutershealth.com

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 12:30:20 -0700

Hi -

> From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
> To: "John Cowan" <[email-masked]>; "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 5:55 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Re: [psg.com #952] how to determine whether an ISO639 registration request has been processed?
...
> I see that you use your
> position.
...

New Flash:  Participation in the IETF is by *individuals*.

Everyone:  *please* stop wasting time and energy on the non-technical
cr*p that some insist on injecting into the mailing list, in the hope of
derailing our work.

Randy, ltru co-chair

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 14:09:38 -0700

Hi -

Ok, I've marked this one "rejected", but included a pointer to Doug's
message in the archive.
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg01619.html

Randy, ltru co-chair

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 17:37:48 +0200

>Win-1252 are charsets.  Latin, Greek, and Cherokee are scripts.

Frank documented what you can do with this mental twist. Scripts are named 
in ISO 15924 ane are collections of characters documented in ISO 10646 with 
their digital value. Charsets are collections of characters with their 
digital encoding, which can be documented in various ISO or non ISO 
documents like ISO 10646, ISO 8859-1, etc. Default Internet charset is the 
UTF-8 global script.

Anyway, non of them gives me a correct French keyboard :-)

As long as I have not one, and all the people of the world do not have a 
collections of characters to produce a keyboard respecting their language, 
I am sorry but all this will call for more than a mental twist to satisfies me.

BTW , I always wander (and nobody answered) what is going to be the use for 
your browser to know the name of the Script? Will it tell you "Hi! John, 
you entered Mongolian script", or will it call a collection of digital 
records to do someting with them? Or is it just for statistics?

jfc

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 22:30:49 +0200

>cr*p that some insist on injecting into the mailing list, in the hope of

I am not sure this is a call of order in reference to the insults I must 
accept.
But I agree that there is a lot of work made on this WG to derail the Charter.
jfc

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 19:00:38 -0400

JFC (Jefsey) Morfin scripsit:

> their digital value. 

Many ISO 15924 scripts are not presently encoded, and ISO 15924
in no way depends on ISO 10646.

> UTF-8 global script.

UTF-8 is not a script.

> Anyway, non of them gives me a correct French keyboard :-)

Keyboards are neither scripts nor encodings.

> records to do someting with them? Or is it just for statistics?

A browser could look for a Mongolian font, or could replace the document
with a note that it is in a script you don't understand, or transliterate
it into a script you do understand.  But of course language tags are not
confined to browsers: they can also be used, for example, to catalogue
resources.

-- 
Babies are born as a result of the              John Cowan
mating between men and women, and most          http://www.reutershealth.com
men and women enjoy mating.                     http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    --Isaac Asimov in Earth: Our Crowded Spaceship      [email-masked]

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 16:41:16 -0700

Hi -

> To: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 1:30 PM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] [psg.com #952] how to determine whether an ISO 639 registration request has been processed?
>
...

It is, though it is primarily a call to order in reference to the counterproductive
material present in many of Jefsey's postings.  I call upon Jefsey to stick to the
technical problems at hand, and I call upon the rest of the WG to do likewise.

Doug's response about "treachery and skulduggery" was unhelpful, but understandable
in light of Jefsey's patently offensive initial comment. (number 23 in
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00540.html )

Randy, ltru co-chair

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 02:22:40 +0200

On 01:41 12/05/2005, Randy Presuhn said:
>Doug's response about "treachery and skulduggery" was unhelpful, but 
>understandable in light of Jefsey's patently offensive initial comment. 
>(number 23 in http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00540.html )

The comment is correct. It may be Franglishly awkward, but itis not 
offensive. It says that the MUST is inadequate because its procedure of 
application is not documented. It then say how the MUST and the lack of 
procedure will be understood (because this is the way it was understood by 
_every_ of the five reviewers I called upon. It was also a point which 
really upset them).

Anyway, I am sure that if that comment was patently offensive, the Chairs 
would have clarified the issue with me before broadcasting it as 
#952.  This point is obviously out of a Draft non replacing RFC 3066 and 
does not prevent consens on that case. This point is an absolute blocking 
factor as is language treatment disparity.
jfc

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 01:43:29 +0200

On 01:00 12/05/2005, John Cowan said:
>they can also be used, for example, to catalogue
>resources.

Such as keyboard's keys?
jfc

---

From: Erkki Kolehmainen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 11:15:38 +0300

I'd like to comment on the need to know the script. The end user needs 
this information, in order to determine whether she or he is able to 
even recognize the characters used in the text, particularly if the 
orthographies of a given language provide for several scripts to choose 
from. Also, for many of the lesser known languages, the end user may not 
even be aware of the one and only script. The end user can only get the 
information if it is available for the browser. (In my book, UTF-8 can 
never be characterized as a script).

Erkki I. Kolehmainen

JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:

> Frank documented what you can do with this mental twist. Scripts are 
> named in ISO 15924 ane are collections of characters documented in ISO 
> 10646 with their digital value. Charsets are collections of characters 
> with their digital encoding, which can be documented in various ISO or 
> non ISO documents like ISO 10646, ISO 8859-1, etc. Default Internet 
> charset is the UTF-8 global script.
> 
> collections of characters to produce a keyboard respecting their 
> language, I am sorry but all this will call for more than a mental twist 
> to satisfies me.
> 
> BTW , I always wander (and nobody answered) what is going to be the use 
> for your browser to know the name of the Script? Will it tell you "Hi! 
> John, you entered Mongolian script", or will it call a collection of 
> digital records to do someting with them? Or is it just for statistics?
> 
> jfc