> From: ietf-languages-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-languages- > bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bruce Lilly > > That is not at all the aim here wrt stability; rather, the aim is that a > > symbolic identifier used for metadata in IT systems not change because > > some government on a whim says, "We would now prefer to use 'yz' rather > > than 'xy' to designate our country." > > If by international agreement, 'yz' becomes the designation > for that country, then it is rather silly to stick one's > fingers in one's ears and shout "NA-NA-NA-NA-NA I don't want > to hear you". That misses the point entirely. The point is that IDs used by political administrations may change for any number of reasons, and those admministrations may have no qualms with such changes; but in IT systems, we cannot afford changes that break existing implementations and data. If for whatever reason ISO and the UN decided that "US" should be used to designate the country of France, I doubt you'd expect every software vendor to update all of their deployed installations to use "fr-US" instead of "fr-FR", and for every user to go through every data repository they manage to make such changes in their data. The people that maintain time zone definitions may have their means for changing times; that's fine for them. They are not dealing with the same concerns as we are dealing with. The group here that has focused specifically on language-tagging issues for several years has evaluated issues that affect language tags and the impact of changes and has decided what is best practice for *this* domain, and it is to maintain stability of data rather than cater to whims of political administrations. > "Designed" or not, country codes *are* read by humans; they > appear in top-level domain names. Currently the ISO 639 > 2-letter codes mean the same thing as the last component of > a domain name I think you mean ISO 3166 2-letter codes. > and as the second component of a language-tag. > It's rather silly to change that correspondence simply because > a few people are piqued that international agreement has been > reached to change a few 2-letter codes. The usability flaw in treating ISO 639 and ISO 3166 as human-readable is evident in the confusion between ja and JP (or is it jp and JA?), and GB vs UK. As for what is silly, if the UN country ID for Canada changed to CN (and that for PRC changed to something else), I'm sure it would cause far greater problems for users to have to change the last two letters in domain names than for them to keep doing what they always did. In fact, I would have thought it would create a rather significant problem on the Internet if such a change were made. (URIs don't come with versioning dates for domain names, so how would a DNS server know what the "cn" meant?) > > Neither RFC 1766 or RFC 3066 has ever presented "official" translations; > > Both defer to the ISO lists for definitions (not "translations") > of the various codes. Definitions; not language names for display use. > > this is no different for RFC 3066bis. > > It is very different; under the proposed draft, there is only > an English definition, somebody wishing to provide a French > definition finds that he has none and must resort to an > unofficial translation. The more you press this, the more silly it seems. RFC 3066 does not anywhere discuss display names; localization data is beyond its scope. The registry it defines does not give provision for French language names. The source ISO standards are every bit as accessible as they ever were, and just as RFC 3066 gave the user no option but to refer to the source ISO standard, so users should and can continue to do so. After this response, I will not waste my time any further on this foolishness. > I'm willing to postpone the discussion > (other problems with the proposed registry format dictate > a broader solution which could easily have provision for > an arbitrary number of descriptions). I strongly object to the suggestion that progress on this draft be delayed to deal with this non issue that caters to implementation issues that are well beyond the scope of either RFC 3066 or its proposed replacement. > No, you are overlooking the fact that a set of codes with > no corresponding definitions is useless. RFC 3066 defers > the code/definition pairs to ISO, which provides multilingual > definitions. The proposed draft would remove that multilingual > characteristic. What if the registry provide no name, just the ID? Then people would have to refer to the source ISO standard as they did in the past, and we would be able specify which ISO IDs were or were not valid. That would achieve the goal that we had wrt stability while eliminating the concern that English-only annotations for some reason apparently create for you. Personally, I think the English annotation is helpful, but it seems that the real solution you're looking for is to remove any annotation whatsoever so that the situation is closer to what we have under RFC 3066. > > Display names for languages and countries are not within the scope of > > RFC 1766 or RFC 3066. It is preposterous to suggest that this draft is > > not compatible with existing implementations of RFC 3066 on that basis. > > 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, 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*. And at the present time, the meaning of > those codes is defined -- bilingually -- in the ISO > lists. RFC 3066 did not even discuss let alone provide a means for attaching display text to codes. It *is* preposterous to suggest that this draft is incompatible with RFC 3066 on that basis. Again, the more you press this, the more silly it seems. > > But > > you are simply adding localization requirements to a spec for i18n > > infrastructure, and I consider that not at all appropriate. > > No, I am complaining about removal of internationalized > definitions associated with language tag components. No definitions are removed. The draft points to the source ISO standards just as RFC 3066 does. > "Localization" would be translation of the French definition > into some other language. That is not my concern. My concern > is the elimination of the French definition in the first place. No, you have not commented on definitions; you have repeatedly commented on stings to present to users. Please accept that your arguments on this matter are empty. > > > One part of my claim is that non-private-use RFC 3066 tags > > > up to the present time are no longer than 11 octets in length. > > > > Only co-incidently at the present time. > > As mentioned, under RFC 1766/3066 review/registration rules, > excessively long tags would certainly raise objections. That's > no coincidence -- it's an intentional design feature. But excessive is not defined anywhere in RFC 1766/3066, and if there was a very good reason presented why a tag of x characters long were needed, it would have to be considered. > > And so that limit would be a constraint applying for all time to the > > 'grandfathered' production which concerned you so much. > > And so it can easily be incorporated into that ABNF production. The productive thing would be for you to provide a suggested revision of the ABNF to the authors. Peter Constable Microsoft Corporation _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf