Subject: [Ltru] Re: Fallback vs. Macrolanguage? (was: John Cowan throws in...)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:38:58 -0800

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> Wouldn't it be easier, more consistent, cleaner, and cherry-free...
>
> I don't think it's necessarily appropriate to fall back in all cases 
> of macrolanguages (as Peter's list shows), and it may well be 
> appropriate to fall back in some cases that aren't macrolanguages at 
> all (Breton -> French is the example we've talked about a lot).  Using 
> a different name lets us decouple from 639-3's particular choices.

We can keep the Macrolanguage name and follow the ISO 639-3 mappings 
exactly, or we can give this field a new name (such as John's 
suggestion, "Fallback") and cherry-pick the ones like Chinese and Arabic 
where one variety dominates.  I think it would be too confusing to have 
both, as I said before about having both a Macrolanguage field and 
extlangs.

However, I strongly oppose any efforts to add our own, non-ISO 639 
mappings to the Registry, even seemingly obvious ones like Breton -> 
French.  That way lies complete madness.  We will never come anywhere 
close to getting all of them, and we will be reviled for "ignoring" the 
ones we miss, and every decision to either include or not include some 
mapping will be viewed by someone as an intentional slight or attempted 
subjugation of one of the languages involved.  Please, let's leave this 
kind of mapping up to each application.

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

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:51:26 -0800

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:

> That's a difficult issue. What some people want, at this time, is to 
> *include* RFC 4646 ABNF in RFC 2616bis, in order to make it 
> self-sufficient (anyone knows if there are general IETF guidance here? 
> about cross-RFC references?)

Cross-references like that are generally considered a good thing, aren't 
they?  They reduce the chances of introducing a typo that changes the 
ABNF, and serve to discourage each application from adopting their own, 
slightly different syntax.

"Self-sufficiency" should be a complete non-goal.  How many modern RFCs 
seek to define MUST and SHOULD independently of RFC 2119, or the format 
of a mail message independently of RFC (2)822?