Re: In defense of Plane 14 language tags (long)

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Tue Nov 05 2002 - 21:50:03 EST

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    John Hudson scripsit:

    > I don't think anyone is questioning that language tagging is a good and
    > useful thing. The question is whether using character codepoints as
    > language identifiers is a good thing. I'm inclined to the view that it is
    > not, and that language tagging should be handled, along with most (all?)
    > other tagging, at a higher level.

    I think it's time to remember the limited purpose for which Plane 14
    tagging was created: plain-text protocol messages. The idea is that
    when contacting an IETF-protocol server, it should be able to report
    back in various languages, using plain-text tagging to indicate which
    language you are getting (or, if it reports in multiple languages,
    which is which).

    This was considered to be a situation where heavyweight (XML, etc.)
    metadata was unnecessary:

    --> RETR 32
    <-- 522 LTAG{en}I have no clueLTAG{art-lojban}mi na jimpe 

    -- 
John Cowan                              <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              http://www.reutershealth.com
Unified Gaelic in Cyrillic script!
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Celticonlang

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