Subject: Re: [Ltru] Uniqueness of variant subtags

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 07:30:10 -0600

<mark at macchiato dot com> wrote:

> Thanks for the comments. After thinking about it a bit, I made some 
> significant edits, as follows.

I can live with this.  I'm still concerned that we are not only opening 
the door to the type of year-abuse I've complained about, but stationing 
a barker outside the door to push people in.  But by no means is it a 
syntactic or common-sense showstopper, as the idea of "two different 
'1901' subtags" was.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ

> <t>Records are unique by Type and Subtag: the registry MUST not
> contain two different records that have identical values for both Type
> and Subtag. Thus requests to assign an additional record of a given
> Type with an existing Subtag value MUST be rejected. For example, the
> variant subtag 'rozaj' already exists in the registry, so adding a
> second record of type 'variant' with the subtag 'rozaj' is prohibited.
> However, information <i>can</i> be added to an existing record. For
> example, the '1994' subtag variant record could have the prefix
> 'fr-CA' added together with a description of usage for a French
>Canadian spelling reform associated with the year 1994.</t>
>
> <t>Variant subtags that are used with multiple prefixes must have
> consistent semantics across those prefixes. Variant subtags MAY
> indicate an organization (including governments), such as 'ungegn',
> 'usbgn', or 'cisgost'. When applied to different prefixes, each would
> consistently refer to a variant as specified by that organization for
> those prefixes. For example, 'ungegn' could be defined as referring to
> a transliteration for any given prefix as specified by the United
> Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN).</t>
>
> <t>Four digit subtags are reserved for indicating a year. Their
> meaning is in reference to some significant specification or other
> work associated with that year. It may have multiple prefixes: the
> particular specification for a given prefix MUST be clearly indicated
> in one of the Descriptions.</t>

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---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 20:40:25 -0600

Gerard Meijssen <gerard dot meijssen at gmail dot com> wrote:

> I do want to remind you all of the opinion expressed that it would not 
> be a good idea to include numbers in a code.

I don't remember seeing anyone express that opinion.  Perhaps I missed 
something.

It certainly wasn't me; I said that *years* (not just "numbers") should 
not be used in a subtag *unless* the variety being tagged is clearly 
associated with a year in some way.