Subject: [Ltru] Proposal: URIs for language tags

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 01:51:52 -0500

There are various contexts in which non-representational objects such
as languages are represented by URIs.  At present, there is no standard
URI for a BCP 47 language tag.  The current draft of RDF-Topic Maps
Interoperability proposes a local set of URIs, but I think it would be
better to have a universal set.

This would be a new section of 4646bis, and the issues are

1)	whether to do it at all
2)	what set of URIs to use.

I think something of the form

	http://www.iana.org/assignments/XXXX?en-us

would be suitable.  Note the lowercasing of the tag part.  This is a URI
pattern, not an URL pattern, and need not return anything in particular
when fetched.

We should negotiate with IANA to determine the appropriate value of XXXX.
IMHO "language-subtag-registry" is inappropriate, and "language-tags"
and "lang-tags/XXX" are in use for the old 3066 registry.  "langtag",
singular, no hyphen, might be good.

-- 
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: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 09:54:17 +0100

On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 01:51:52AM -0500,
 John Cowan <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 37 lines which said:

> would be suitable.

While I am myself quite sympathetic to the idea of URL (see
http://norman.walsh.name/2006/07/25/namesAndAddresses), I know that
many people will ask "why not URN?". So, I ask for them: why not RFC
2648 or similar? urn:ietf:langtag:fr-CI? Or a new scheme like in RFC
4501? langtag:fr-CI?

A possible concern is that people and programs will try to use the URI
as a locator, if it is an URL and that IANA servers may not like it.