Subject: RE: [Ltru] Re: John Cowan's substantive commentsondraft-ietf-ltru-registry-01

From: "Peter Constable" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 09:22:57 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
On Behalf Of
> Addison Phillips

> I'm partial to John's suggestion here and I did reform the
registration form, but the
> following items have no field defined currently:
> 
> 1. Name of requester:
> 2. E-mail address of requester:
> 4. Intended meaning of the subtag:
> 5. Reference to published description
> of the language (book or article):
> 6. Any other relevant information:
> 
> Name of the requester could be given a field ("Registered-By"??)
> 
> Email address of the requester and reference to published description
would probably
> require us to add support for the other valid URI (RFC3986) characters
to a field-value,
> since a common way to reference materials is in the form of a URI.
Otherwise the
> reference is a comment-like field. I'm not sure that putting the email
address into the
> registry is a good idea: it's useful during the registration process,
but not necessarily
> useful afterwards.
> 
> "Any other relevant information" could be "Comment" and can be
removed. It is good
> form to put such a field into a form, though.
> 
> I'm not sure how "intended meaning" differs from the description field
in the record.
> We could probably remove that.

I think the name and email address of the requester are administrative
items required when processing the registration request, and that are
not needed in the registry itself. I'm not enthusiastic about including
email addresses in the registry. I note that the present 3066 registry
includes a list of contributors with email addresses at the end, but
email addresses are not necessarily enduring, and their inclusion
constitutes a security issue.

As for the "Intended meaning..." and "Reference..." fields, these fall
under the problem of how to document the denotation of the tag, a
problem that exists in ISO 639 as well. On the one hand, a language name
such as "Ndebele" is insufficient for conveying what the denotation is;
often a significant amount of additional information is really
necessary. On the other hand, you don't really want to include unbounded
encyclopaedic information in a machine-readable registry field as
normative information: it's not useful to a machine, it can lead to
extreme bloating, and it is impossible to characterize what is normative
about such content.

If the IANA site will continue to store and make available copies of the
registration request forms, then these fields do not need to be added to
the registry proper. Perhaps a comment at the beginning of the registry
file with a reference to the folder containing the request forms would
be useful.

Peter Constable

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