Subject: [Ltru] choice of subtags in multilingual documents (gen-art #19)

From: "Addison Phillips" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 12:01:08 -0700

> > s4.1: Item 2: example: I am not clear how one would represent the 
> > combination of latin and braille since only one script subtag seems 
> > to be allowed.  Maybe there is a special subtag for the combination? 
> > or is it intended that both complete tags are used?
> [Addison Phillips]
> 
> If runs of text may be marked up individually, then they should be.
> Otherwise the language tag indicates the intended audience of the 
> content (which will be one or the other). You could equally say the 
> same of a document that mixes English and French or en-US and en-GB.
> 
> Yes, multilingual documents (and not just multi-script documents) 
> exist which do not have any particular primary language that is 
> "above" the others, but that is a limitation of the headers or other 
> meta-data structures that use language tags, not the tags themselves. 
> Tags identify one language unambiguously, not multiple languages or 
> language forms mixed together. The higher level protocol must deal with that.
> 
> See for example the section "Two types of language declaration" in:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/language-decl/

Proposal Resolution:

I think we can reject this particular item, although we might consider more tutorial material on this topic in Section 4.1 (Choice of Language Tag).

Addison P. Phillips
Globalization Architect, Quest Software
http://www.quest.com

Chair, W3C Internationalization Core Working Group
http://www.w3.org/International

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture. 

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