(Nor should my questions on this subject be seen as suggesting either that I as an individual, or particularly Apple as a company, is unhappy revising RFC 3066.)
At 12:35 PM -0800 1/6/05, Dave Singer wrote:
At 12:14 PM -0800 1/6/05, Peter Constable wrote:> From: Dave Singer [mailto:singer@xxxxxxxxx]
Sorry, I should have gone on to conclude: the important aspect of sub-tags is that their nature and purpose be identifiable and explained (e.g. that this is a country code), and that we retain compatibility with previous specifications.
Ah! Then the proposed draft ensures that the nature of subtags are always identifiable, which RFC 3066 (as I mentioned earlier) fails to do.
And the draft retains compatibility with previous specifications using an assumption (thoroughly discussed and concluded on the IETF-languages list a year ago) that, in case of left-prefix matching processes, script distinctions are generally far more important that country distinctions.
as has been beautifully pointed out on the list, that is a view that is lingo-centric. If what I am trying to differentiate is the price (and the currency of the price) of an item, the country may be much more important than the script that the price is written in. (this is also an example for the last point below). I repeat, I don't think truncation -- and hence prefix-matching -- is very stable or nearly universally applicable enough to be mentioned. Whereas I do believe compatibility of ordering with 3066 is important.
I don't believe that simple truncation is a necessarily useful operation in all circumstances,
I don't think anyone would dispute that.
and it probably should not be in the spec. at all. For example, I'd say that we should retain the 3066 ordering of language-country and therefore script, if needed, comes later. However, my typesetting subsystem doesn't care a jot about language or country, it just needs to find the script code ('can I render this script'?).
Here I disagree. For other purposes, I think it's very clear that the only time that choice of order matters is with matching algorithms that use simple truncation, and for the most common implementations, which use left-prefix truncation, the order lang-script-country will be far more useful in the long run precisely because script distinctions are generally far more important in matching than country distinctions. I don't know of any case in which a tag might be used that contained all three subtags but in which the country distinction generally matters more than the script distinction.
-- David Singer Apple Computer/QuickTime
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