From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Sat Oct 26 2002 - 05:38:01 EDT
On the http://www.unicode.org/ website is a link entitled
Public Issues for Review
which link leads to the http://www.unicode.org/review/ web page.
The first such issue upon which comments are invited is the following
proposal.
Deprecate the Plane 14 Language Tags
It seems to me that deprecating these language tags might be a bad thing as
the language tags could well have potential use in plain text files on the
DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform) platform in
order to signal to a Java program accessing a text file the language in
which any particular text is written.
At the present time I have no plans to use the Unicode language tags myself,
yet it does seem to me a pity that just as DVB-MHP, which uses Unicode, is
starting to be run in more than one country that an existing method of
encoding information about languages is possibly to be formally deprecated.
Now, there may be good reasons for the deprecation, yet none are stated on
that web page. I feel that I would like to mention the matter of the
possibility of using language tags upon the DVB-MHP platform so that that
can be taken into account by the Unicode Technical Committee when it
discusses the matter.
Certainly I am hoping to send in an informed comment upon the matter in the
manner mentioned on the web page using the online contact form. However,
before doing so, I am wondering if perhaps the reasons for suggesting the
deprecation of plane 14 language tags could please be discussed in this
mailing list.
DVB-MHP broadcasts have recently begun in Germany, there is information on
the http://www.mhp-forum.de website. The text information is in German,
though there are lots of pictures and for many of them clicking upon them
enlarges them. I found the language translation facility at
http://www.google.com very useful for translating the text. Germany follows
Finland in introducing regular DVB-MHP broadcasts.
Information on the DVB-MHP system is available at the http://www.mhp.org
website, in English. There is also the discussion forum at the
http://forum.mhp.org website.
William Overington
26 October 2002
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