Subject: Re: [Slim] Syntax of combination of language tag and Advisory vs Required indication in draft-ietf-slim-negotiating-human-language

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 09:16:45 -0700

Gunnar Hellström wrote:

> How about using a syntax exactly as the Accept-Language for each
> medium and direction.
> That will then be a comma separated list, with the asterisk as one
> element if so wanted.
>
> humintlang-send  =  "a=humintlang-send" HCOLON
>                      [ language *(COMMA language) ]
> language         =  language-range *(SEMI accept-param)
> language-range   =  ( ( 1*8ALPHA *( "-" 1*8ALPHA ) ) / "*" )
> accept-param   =  ("q" EQUAL qvalue) / generic-param
> qvalue         =  ( "0" [ "." 0*3DIGIT ] )
>                   / ( "1" [ "." 0*3("0") ] )
> generic-param  =  token [ EQUAL gen-value ]
> gen-value      =  token / host / quoted-string
>
> And similarly for humintlang-recv

Wasn't there a proposal on this list in March to include the ";q=value"
syntax to indicate absolute preference, and wasn't it decided not to do
that? Is this an attempt to reintroduce that proposal?

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 09:15:16 -0700

Gunnar Hellström wrote:

>> As a side note, while it is true that "RFC 5646 provides a mechanism
>> accommodating increasingly fine-grained distinctions," it is a common
>> myth that it *encourages* such lengthy tags. There is a section in
>> RFC 5646 dealing with the principle "tag content wisely," which has
>> to do in part with omitting unnecessary subtags.
>
> GH: We discussed that there is a way to indicate translated in a
> subtag and that it may be desirable to include such information
> sometimes. Do you regard that still allowable?

Sure. A tag for "English, translated from the original Russian" would be
"en-t-ru". That tag, too, would not be permitted in SLIM applications if
it defined a language tag as 1*8ALPHA.

One must be careful not to go too far either way. Subtags that add
genuine value should usually be included in a tag. Subtags that restate
the obvious or identify details that don't matter (a classic example is
"ja-JP") should usually be excluded.

Because of the myth that BCP 47 encourages overspecified tags, groups
like SLIM that write BCP 47-compliant specs tend to add their own health
warnings about keeping tags short; but excessive restrictions can make
it impossible to express details like "Serbian in Cyrillic" and
"Simplified Chinese" and dilute much of the value of using BCP 47 in the
first place.