Subject: RE: Last Call: Tags for the Identification of Languages to BCP

From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 17:49:23 -0700

I think the real issue here is whether or not the I-D describes a
practice or is a technical specification.  In my option,
it is a technical specification of syntax and semantics of tags
used to indicate language information in protocols (HTTP, LDAP,
others), documents, and elsewhere.  I believe technical
specifications should be published either on the Standard Track,
Informational, or Experimental.  I'd prefer this I-D be considered
for publication on the Standard Track.

Kurt

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From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 15:52:01 +0200

>for publication on the Standard Track.

What turned out in practice was that the most important part of RFC 1766 
was the registration procedure, including the references to authoritative 
sources of tags (ISO 3166 and ISO 646).

This clearly belongs in the BCP category, as do the registration procedures 
for charsets and MIME types; there is no meaningful way there can be more 
than one such document.

The rest of the technical content, namely the syntax of tags (note that the 
Content-Language: header itself is moved to another draft, which WILL be 
standards-track) COULD have been moved to a THIRD document, 
standards-track, but this did not seem like the Right Thing to do; also, if 
published at Proposed, it would have required progression up the standards 
track before any referring document could progress. Did not seem right either.

Someone once commented that the BCP category is best defined by exclusion: 
"stuff that does not fit anywhere else". If so, that seems to apply very 
well here.

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, [email-masked]
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: [email-masked]

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From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 08:35:22 -0700

At 03:52 PM 10/22/00 +0200, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>What turned out in practice was that the most important part of RFC 1766 was the registration procedure, including the references to authoritative sources of tags (ISO 3166 and ISO 646).

I agree that this is an important part.

>This clearly belongs in the BCP category, as do the registration procedures for charsets and MIME types; there is no meaningful way there can be more than one such document.

I concur that the registration procedure belongs in the BCP category.

>The rest of the technical content, namely the syntax of tags (note that the Content-Language: header itself is moved to another draft, which WILL be standards-track) COULD have been moved to a THIRD document, standards-track, but this did not seem like the Right Thing to do; also, if published at Proposed, it would have required progression up the standards track before any referring document could progress. Did not seem right either.

If the technical specification has significantly changed, yes,
the issuing at Proposed is quite appropriate.  Issuing at BCP
allows for the technical specification to bypass the 3 step
maturity process.

Yes, this is a small technical specification, but what concerns
me is the precedence set or extended by allowing BCPs to contain
technical specifications used in standard track protocols.

Kurt