Re: Official ISO 639 changes

From: Martin J. Duerst (duerst@w3.org)
Date: Mon Apr 24 2000 - 21:11:23 EDT


At 00/04/24 16:25 +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
>Ar 11:01 -0400 2000-04-24, scr$ByP(Bbh Rebecca S. Guenther:
> >I've put up the change notice for ISO 639. See:
> >
> >http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/codechanges.html
> >
> >Thanks to Michael Everson for letting me use his coding.
> >
> >Rebecca

Hello Michael,

This is great progress. I hope we can soon see the full
official list of language codes on the web.

Some suggestions/questions:

- Please make sure that this page is served indicating
   iso-8895-1 as its encoding, according to
   http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html#h-5.2.2.

- Please use <th>...</th> instead of <td><b></b></td>
   for the header cells in the table.

- Please use <span class='changed'> or some such instead
   of just <I> for the changed pieces. Use a stylesheet
   to make it display the way you want.

- Trying to distinguish italic and non-italic for short
   strings is tiring. I suggest you add some other means,
   i.e. a light background color, to help the reader more.

- It is not very easy to figure out what has changed in
   all cases. For example, my interpretation is that
       <i>Ossetian;</i> Ossetic
   means that the old version was 'Ossetic' only, but
   I'm not sure.

- The title is not very clear.

   Additions/Changes to ISO 639 Codes as published in:
     ISO 639-1: 1988 (Alpha-2 code)
     ISO 639-2: 1998 (Alpha-3 code)

   can be interpreted to mean that the changes have been
   published in the standards below, but that's not
   true.

- New definitions of 2-letter codes make it more difficult
   to define what code should be used in ietf-based protocols.
   Originally, the idea for the update to RFC 1766 was to use
   the two-letter code where this already existed, but the
   three-letter code for the other languages. This will need
   some more thought, and probably a cutoff date or a precedence
   rule. The table would provide enough information for that.

Regards, Martin.



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