Subject: [Ltru] Summary of comments, draft-ietf-ltru-matching-07

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 08:50:42 +0100

At long last, I have managed to read through the whole of 
draft-ietf-ltru-matching-07 and mark it up with comments.

I am not happy with the current state of this document.

Most important points:

- The writing is inconsistent about what the inputs and outputs of a 
matching function is. Sometimes it talks about language ranges, sometimes 
it talks about language priority lists. I think it needs to always describe 
the function in terms of language priority lists.
Generically:

  Match(LPL, Language-tag-set) => List(pair(Language-tag, score))

where LPL is a language priority list and language-tag-set is the set of 
language tags for the resources to be matched to the request.

- The lookup function, as designed, is broken. It introduces truncation of 
language tags outside of the user's control, and it prefers truncated 
versions of early tags in a LPL to full versions of later ones.
A much better lookup function is simply "use matching and pick the 
highest-scoring result; if the result set is empty, use default". User 
interfaces can do the expansion IF they decide it's useful to do so.

- The spec needs to make up its mind about whether it's specifying an 
algorithm for the IETF standards track or giving a bunch of useful advice 
to people writing language tag matching functions. If it's the former, 
EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE of "an implementation MAY decide to...", where that 
can affect the returned result, needs to be removed from the specification.

A more detailed markup is enclosed, including notes of the five (?) places 
where "zh" has turned into "z.", but these are the 3 high points; I believe 
these are items the WG needs to discuss and have consensus on.

                       Harald
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