From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Nov 05 2002 - 23:56:59 EST
John Hudson wrote:
> > 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.
That's correct: General purpose language information does not belong into
the plain text data stream. John Cowan replied:
>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
That's all fine and dandy - but unless there's demonstrable implementation
of this technique anywhere the conclusion is that it's a solution in search
of a problem and as such subject to cleanup. [Since we can't remove them,
we would
deprecate them, so that countless legions of implementers can forget worrying
about a feature deemed desirable but never put into practice.]
If that premise (neat idea but noone does it) is disproven then the status
quo ante should remain -- limited use for plaintext protocols only.
I've seen lots of discussion about the purpose/potential of the tags - much
of it misguided - but, unless I missed it in the torrent, there seems to be
no smoking gun of IETF style implementations, many years after this
solution was demanded for them.
Case closed.
A./
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