Subject: [Ltru] Re: 3166-1 state machine

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 22:21:11 -0800

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

>> is there really any evidence that people are using non-ISO
>> 3166 ccTLDs in language tags?
>
> For some time I thought that en-UK is correct... :-(  Maybe I
> confuse it with a locale.  Google claims to have 300,000 hits
> for "en-uk" (quoted), most of them probably irrelevant.

That's not evidence of ccTLDs in language tags, that's just an error.
:-)

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

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From: "Jukka K. Korpela" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 19:37:19 +0300 (EEST)

> That's not evidence of ccTLDs in language tags, that's just an error.

Well, yes, it is an error, but a common one. Even the Dublin Core
documents have contained it, e.g.
http://dublincore.org/documents/1999/07/02/dces/
(the current version has it fixed to en-GB).

The error is understandable, since the official name of the country is
"United Kingdom" (long form: "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland"). Besides, the official European Union policy is to use "UK" as
the country code (otherwise using ISO 3166 except for Greece).

Is there a point after which erroneous usage becomes common enough to be
taken so seriously that it be recognized? That would mean keeping "UK" as
country code unassigned (reserved) and treating any use of "UK" as country
code as an error in principle but with the error recovery that it is
interpreted (perhaps with a warning) to mean 'United Kingdom'. Someone
might say that this would mean virtually accepting "UK" as synonym for
"GB" - and this might be regarded as a very bad move.

But after all, metadata is about giving information about data, and if an
author labels his data as, say, applying to country "UK" or being in
language "en-UK", shouldn't we work by what we know he must have _meant_,
instead of just blowing horns and sending error messages around?

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/