Re: Plane 14 language tags

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Wed Jun 28 2000 - 14:00:15 EDT


Doug Ewell wrote:

> 2. (Ken and Glenn) Can you explain in a little more detail the rationale
> for lowercasing the entire language tag? It seems that if RFC 1766
> is the model to be followed, then the RFC 1766 casing convention
> (lowercase for language, uppercase for country) might be preferred.

(Non-authoritative response)

That convention is fine for writing tags, but not so fine for checking them.
If you are given a tag with random capitalization, it is far easier to canonicalize
it to all lower case rather than by the RFC 1766 suggestion, which operationally
is:

        If the tag is of the form xx-yy, then lowercase xx and uppercase yy;
        otherwise lowercase everything.

In addition, as the space of tags grows, we might also have to handle xxx-yy
as well.

Personally, I always use all-lower-case tags: en-us. Note that this is not
the same as the locale en_US, which uses uppercase "US" and an underscore.

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)



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