Subject: [Ltru] Re: Reserving subtags

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:25:22 -0800

Addison Phillips <addison at yahoo dash inc dot com> wrote:

> If we need to co-opt something, we have a couple of places where we 
> can do it without hosing the ABNF:
>
>   - extlangs: they don't *have* to consist solely of ISO 639-3 codes. 
> In particular, we will have something like 6000 language codes that 
> can never be extlangs and these could be registered to have a 
> different, non-extlangy meaning. For example, 'fon' could be 
> 'phonetic'.
>
>   - variants: we can reserve a particular variant pattern to occur 
> before (or, perhaps easier to support, after) all other variants. For 
> example, we could say that all variants that start with 'i' are 
> reserved.

What we *really* ought to consider doing is reading the words we (and 
the IETF) agreed to in RFC 4646, sections 3.4 and 3.6.

* If we want a language subtag, and ISO 639-* won't add it to their 
standard, we register a language subtag.

* If we want a region or script subtag, and ISO 3166 or 15924 won't add 
it to their standard, we register a variant subtag.

We talked about this repeatedly over the last few years.  We designed 
variants for exactly this purpose.  Why change the rules now?

> Note: I do NOT particularly like these ideas. For dealing with the 
> script problems, we really, really ought to talk to ISO 15924.

And if they say no, register a variant.  Just like we said.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

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---

From: "Mark Davis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 16:05:36 -0800

Because, as I have written MANY times (if you can't find an example, I will
repost again), they don't work well with fallback. We didn't anticipate that
the script subcommittee would be unresponsive, so we thought that the
variants encoded in the script position would not be necessary.

Mark

-- 
Mark

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:10:34 -0800

Mark Davis wrote:

> Because, as I have written MANY times (if you can't find an example, I 
> will repost again), they don't work well with fallback.

"Fallback" in this case refers to "basic filtering" as defined in RFC 
4647, which is little more than the remove-from-right approach described 
in RFC 3066.

As I have written at least once before, if not MANY times: if we are 
going to assume that implementations will use only basic filtering, and 
are going to tailor registrations and rules around that assumption, we 
should not have bothered writing RFC 4647 in the first place.  We could 
have simply said "Use RFR and cross your fingers" and been done with it. 
We could have saved almost a year getting RFC 4646 and 4645 published if 
we hadn't had to wait for 4647.

> We didn't anticipate that the script subcommittee would be 
> unresponsive,

I'd prefer "unwilling to register IPA as a script" as more NPOV.  That's 
really what this is about; few other quasi-scripts have been discussed.

> so we thought that the variants encoded in the script position would 
> not be necessary.

Then we should not have written Section 3.4, item 10.C, and Section 3.6, 
bullet point 2, if we did not feel they would be necessary and did 
intend to honor them in the event they were.