Bruce Lilly <blilly@xxxxxxxxx> wrote on 2004-12-12 T 18:44:27 -0500 (...) > RFC 1766 (and 3066) leave you little choice; if you wish > to indicate a region, you either have to do it with ISO > 639 codes or you have to register a separate tag (no > separate tag for German as spoken in Alsace exists). Never > mind the shortcomings of that particular example; consider > "de-DE" -- does that mean Germany as it exists today, West > Germany as it existed 25 years ago, Germany as it existed > in the 1930s, the 1900s, ...? As far as I can tell, this is about about /language/ tags, not about the tagging of borders or nationalities. These last two have certainly influence on the use of language, but should not on the name and tagging of the language itself. Unless there is some forced change of language, which needs to be reflected in tagging. (...) > On the contrary, it is preposterous to suggest that codes > will be attached to text by magic; some human somewhere, > somehow is going to have to indicate the language to > something, Tagging may also be done by some software instead of a human being. Whether you consider that "magic" is up to you, but I think both ways of finding a tag for a given text are possible. > and it certainly isn't going to be by way of > a 2- or 3-letter code without some reference to what those > codes *mean*. I beg to differ. Many humans do not know the lists, not even their name, and yet they use the codes on a daily basis. They simply recall the codes they've seen and found relevant to them, like the TLD ones they are used to; or they are told by somebody "use this tag when using language A and that tag when using language B". This information may be wrong or outdated, of course. Please do not assume tags will be assigned only by humans who have a recent list of the code(s) at hand. Just my 0.02?. Best regards, J. Wilkes _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf