From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@jtcsv.com)
Date: Fri Apr 23 2004 - 21:48:36 EDT
You can reiterate it all you want; in practice, 3066 tags are used as locale
identifiers. And for a narrow sense of locales, that is perfectly reasonable.
For a broad sense of "locale", including timezone, user's currency, religious
preference, etc., it clearly would not be reasonable, and I would agree with you
for that.
>ISO 639 is not unstable. It is an open code set that is being added to
over time, but I don't think that should be referred to as unstable --
that term suggests other things.
ISO 3066 has *demonstrated* instability, because they remove codes, then reuse
those codes for different entities. It'd be like our removing a character, then
later putting a different character in that spot*.
ISO 639 has not yet *demonstrated* instability. They have removed codes, but
since they haven't reused them, one can handle that with an alias table, keeping
all the old codes usable. However, there is no policy documented *anywhere* that
says they won't. As long as they don't have that, and given the demonstrated
instability in ISO 3066, the standard simply cannot be trusted to be stable in
the future.
* Yes, I know we did that for Korean, when we were first getting started. But we
learned from that, and put into place firm policies against that ever happening
in the future. We have no such assurances from ISO, for some pretty key
components: language codes, country codes, currency codes, or script codes.
Mark
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► शिष्यादिच्छेत्पराजयम् ◄
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com>
To: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com>; "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>;
"Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Fri, 2004 Apr 23 16:18
Subject: RE: Common Locale Data Repository Project
> From: unicore-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicore-bounce@unicode.org]
On Behalf
> Of Mark Davis
> You are talking about Locale IDs. There is currently work underway on
an RFC to
> replace 3066
But let me reiterate from my correction to Philippe: even the
replacement of RFC 3066 is a specification for *language*
identification, not *locale* identification.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
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