Subject: [Ltru] In defense of private-use (was: Re: rfc4646bis-18 example in 2.2.7)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 20:48:49 -0700

Randy Presuhn <randy underscore presuhn at mindspring dot com> wrote:

> RFC 4646 says:
>    "Private use subtags are NOT RECOMMENDED where alternatives exist
>     or for general interchange."
>    "They SHOULD NOT be used where alternatives exist and SHOULD NOT
>     be used in content or protocols intended for general use."
>    "Private use subtags are simply useless for information exchange
>     without prior arrangement."

I said at the time we added all this scary wording, and still believe, 
that the actual damage that would result from private-use (PU) tags and 
subtags leaking outside the private-agreement space is overstated.  Our 
experience, such as it is, with PU "x-mumble" tags since RFC 1766 and 
tags with PU "-x-mumble" subtags since RFC 4646 simply doesn't show 
widespread evidence of a breakdown in interoperability caused by abuse 
of the PU mechanism.

Adherence to the private-agreement principle should be the 
responsibility of the tag consumer as well as the tag producer.  If a 
tag consumer encounters a tag like "id-x-apapun" and wasn't expecting 
that particular PU subtag, it should just throw the subtag away and 
interpret "id".  If it encounters a PU whole tag like "x-karkoli", it 
should throw the whole thing away and treat the content as untagged.

The standard worst-use-case is if I am party to a private agreement that 
"x-fnord" means one thing, and you are party to a *different* private 
agreement that "x-fnord" means something else, and I put my "x-fnord" 
content out on the net and you pick it up.  Sure enough, we have an 
breakdown in interoperability.  But have we seen any evidence that this 
sort of thing is happening and causing problems in the real world?  Most 
likely, if people are using PU tags and subtags, they're probably either 
so obscure that the probability of collisions is minuscule, or so 
obvious that any collisions are mostly harmless.  Anyone want to guess 
what content tagged "en-x-piglatin" would look like?  Who would use this 
PU subtag to mean anything else?

I'm not arguing that everyone should throw their PU tags into a big 
melting pot and we start playing "tag roulette" trying to guess what 
each other's tags mean.  But all these Armageddon scenarios are 
overblown IMHO, compared to the very real (and proven) danger of people 
ignoring the spec altogether and just inventing their own tags. 
Wikimedia uses "tokipona" for Toki Pona.  Wouldn't it be better if they 
used "x-tokipona", even in the absence of a formal private agreement? 
Realistically -- not theoretically -- would this tag really be "simply 
useless"?

--
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

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 22:02:19 -0800

Hi -

> From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
> To: "LTRU Working Group" <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 7:48 PM
> Subject: [Ltru] In defense of private-use (was: Re: rfc4646bis-18 example in2.2.7)
>
...

As co-chair - if you really want to re-open section 4.6 of
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ltru-4646bis-18.txt
please send text.  But if we start down this path, then I really
think we should not pass it to the IESG, but rather take it back into
the working group until we can find agreement on this issue, and do
another WG last call.  I don't want to go there, but if we can't
resolve something as fundamental as 4.6, we have no business trying to
pass this off as a BCP.

Randy

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 01:14:55 -0500

Randy Presuhn scripsit:

> please send text.  

I definitely don't want to go there, so the scary language can stand.
People will ignore it anyhow.

I meant to say earlier that expecting CLDR to 
become the registration authority for an extension registry of
collations is not reasonable: it's outside their remit.

-- 
John Cowan    [email-masked]    http://ccil.org/~cowan
This great college [Trinity], of this ancient university [Cambridge],
has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson
sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar
than Wordsworth, somewhere betwixt and between.  --A.E. Housman
_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:18:46 +0900

>People will ignore it anyhow.

Good. I think Doug has a point, in that in practice private use
tags haven't hurt interoperability too much. But I guess this is
because enough people understand private use (sub)tags are a bad
idea. And that may be (in part) because we use the (scary) language
we do. So I agree that we should leave the language as it is.

Regards,   Martin.

#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[email-masked]