Subject: [Ltru] Too fine-grained? (was: Re: Uniqueness of variant subtags)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 20:31:36 -0600

When we talk about registering year-based variants for minor revisions 
of an orthography, or other regulatable aspect of a language, we should 
keep in mind some of the main reasons we have language tags in the first 
place:

1. to allow people to identify the language of content

2. to allow people or computers to search for content in a particular 
language

3. to allow people to specify "preferred languages" in which they wish 
to receive content

The finer-grained our language tagging solutions become, such as 
"no-1907" versus "no-1917", the less likely it is that all of these use 
cases will be met.  Remember that this group has a history of assuming 
the lowest common denominator among searching and matching engines. 
(That's why we have Suppress-Script, because we think many searching and 
matching engines won't know to strip the script subtag from 
"de-Latn-AT".)

So before we assume that we'll eventually have lots of 1917's and 1959's 
and 1994's colliding with each other, and need to make sure all of them 
can coexist, we might want to think about whether these are distinctions 
that need to be made in language tags.

--
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

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From: Leif Halvard Silli <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:49:09 +0200

Doug Ewell 2008-10-03 04.31:
   [...]

> cases will be met.

The disadvantages are also the advantages: You don't want 
"nn-1907" to be spelling checked like current "nn", so it may be 
fine if the computer does not try to spell-check "nn-1917". 
(Perhaps the alternative would be to "un-tag", or use an incorrect 
tag for texts following the 1917 norm, in order to avoid such 
spell-checking.)

OTOH, a variant can sometimes come in place for a new language 
subtag - and thus can keep things together rather than be 
splitting. E.g. I understand that some prefer Resian to be 
registered as its own language. So this hints that variant subtags 
can also simplify and join rather than complicate and split.

   [...]

> that need to be made in language tags.

The alterantive will often be x-private subtags, I think. And they 
are even harder to get computers or people to handle.
-- 
leif halvard silli
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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 12:19:39 +0200

On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 08:31:36PM -0600,
 Doug Ewell <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 8 lines which said:

> 2. to allow people or computers to search for content in a particular language
> 3. to allow people to specify "preferred languages" in which they
> wish to receive content

There are certainly other important reasons. For instance, to allow a
graphical renderer or a spell checker or a speech synthetizer to apply
the correct rules. Unlike 2 and 3 (where broad tagging is better),
this requires fine-grain tagging.