Subject: [Ltru] Up-to-date copies of the LSR

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 21:14:29 -0400

Randy Presuhn scripsit:

> > Having an up-to-date 
> > copy of the Registry is something that should be encouraged.
> 
> As a technical contributor, I believe this would be a grave mistake,
> unless we *severely* qualify what is meant by "user."  I believe
> that vast majority of users have no need whatsoever for language
> tag validators.  Normal users should never even see language tags,
> much less be creating them.  Language tags used in protocol should be
> put there by software as a result of other user choices.  I think the
> only folks who should be using tag validators are the developers of
> applications which generate language tags.  These are hardly typical
> "users".

I don't think it's so simple.  I've been talking with Eric Muller of
uhdrinunicode.org, who's developing Unicode plain-text versions of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a large variety of languages.
Currently he uses Ethnologue tags, and he's asked me whether a RFC4646bis
prototype evaluator is available so he can look into converting to that
standard when it becomes available.  (Doug?)

Apache, to take another example, can do language negotation if
appropriately configured, so that if you ask for foo.html in French,
you get foo.html.fr, whereas if you ask for foo.html in English, you
get foo.html.en.  The people who create those files, if they do so by
hand, need to use language tags.

I think Doug means not that people should be encouraged to pull the
LSR dynamically, but rather that programs that encapsulate the state of
the LSR (like his Windows version) should be made widely available and
updated fairly regularly, monthly or every two months or whatever.

-- 
You let them out again, Old Man Willow!                 John Cowan
What you be a-thinking of?  You should not be waking!   [email-masked]
Eat earth!  Dig deep!  Drink water!  Go to sleep!
Bombadil is talking.                                    http://ccil.org/~cowan

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From: Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:39:23 -0700

> updated fairly regularly, monthly or every two months or whatever.

On the other hand, during a presentation to the W3C last week, they 
pointed out that a large part of the load on their servers was the 
(usually pointless) dynamic downloading of DTDs. We should at least 
consider automated methods in which a server can verify that its copy of 
the registry is the latest that do not involve pulling the whole file.

One way to do this, for example, would be a changelog format:

File-Date: 2006-09-11
%%
(some record)
%%
(another record)
%%
File-Date: 2006-09-07
%%
(yet another record)
...

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:49:40 -0400

> One way to do this, for example, would be a changelog format:

That will certainly work, but I can think of two simpler approaches, both
of which can be used concurrently, that strike me as just about as good:

1) Provide the File-Date of the current registry as a separate resource
with its own URI as well as in the current registry resource.  Then you
can pull the little resource and only pull the big one if warranted.

2) If you are writing a client that does dynamic pulls, use the HTTP
If-Modified-Since: header to avoid pulling unchanged versions.

-- 
John Cowan <[email-masked]>             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Today an interactive brochure website, tomorrow a global content
management system that leverages collective synergy to drive "outside of
the box" thinking and formulate key objectives into a win-win game plan
with a quality-driven approach that focuses on empowering key players
to drive-up their core competencies and increase expectations with an
all-around initiative to drive up the bottom-line. --Alex Papadimoulis

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:58:38 +0200

Addison Phillips wrote:
 
> One way to do this, for example, would be a changelog format

Another is sending a HEAD request to the IANA server, answer:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:56:21 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux)
Last-Modified: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:44:40 GMT
ETag: "101fb7-141dc-44f4b548"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 82396
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain

---

From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 14:30:28 -0700

> From: John Cowan [mailto:[email-masked]]

> If-Modified-Since: header to avoid pulling unchanged versions.

What about providing delta files that can be used to patch a local copy
of the LSR to incorporate changes made during some period, perhaps with
new deltas provided on a regular (e.g. quarterly) basis?

Peter Constable

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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:55:36 -0400

> new deltas provided on a regular (e.g. quarterly) basis?

That was Addison's original suggestion; I was suggesting a compromise
measure that just warns you when you need not pull.  Frank's suggestion
of using the HTTP HEAD method works too.

-- 
John Cowan  [email-masked]  http://ccil.org/~cowan
The penguin geeks is happy / As under the waves they lark
The closed-source geeks ain't happy / They sad cause they in the dark
But geeks in the dark is lucky / They in for a worser treat
One day when the Borg go belly-up / Guess who wind up on the street.

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From: Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:18:27 -0700

> of using the HTTP HEAD method works too.

Documenting HEAD is a good idea, even if we were to do something else.

Addison