From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 19 2004 - 20:00:50 CDT
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On
> Behalf Of Antoine Leca
> What is the problem?
> Do not tell me you worry about the size of the resulting package...
All I am worried about is cleaning up ISO 639, including making sure
that it's clear what the denotation of every item is, identifying any
synonyms, and resolving any other such issues. I'm not at all concerned
about the cost of having 101 locales vs. 100. I'm concerned about things
like the costs to implementers of mismanaged resources due to
duplication (e.g. UI strings or Web content that gets out of sync), or
the cost to users who can't find the content they want because it's
tagged with a different but synonymous identifier. Having synonyms in a
coding system is not a great idea (or, at least there are added
implementation costs if a coding system has synonyms); having
undocumented synonyms is simply bad.
> Furthermore, you (and your company) do not want to play politics, do
you?
I'm not trying to resolve a specific issue that my company has; I'm
trying to evaluate what the committeee charged with maintaining a
particular ISO standard should do. In this particular case, deprecation
is one option that the committee can consider; I'm trying to examine
whether that would create problems with implementations (not problems
resulting from geo-political sensitivities) that might make that option
too costsly.
BTW, just to be clear, my question wasn't about the deprecation of
"Moldavian"; it was about the deprecation of "mo". There is no reason
why the denotation of "ro" couldn't be documented as "Romanian;
Moldavian". There may still be political issues as to whether the two
can be equated, and perhaps some may complain that the identifier shows
a bias; but it is not about whether the "Moldavian" identity has
validity.
> By the way, the users may not be a good source for informations on
such a
> question... The ones which do have an eye about the ID are computer
people
Just to be clear, the particular question I was asking was not meant to
be directed at users; it was meant for people involved in IT
implementations. That's why I asked it on this list.
> As you have already noticed in this thread, the issue is debatable
A bigger issue than the question I asked is certainly debatable; the
question I had in mind, I think, is not. Let me put it this way: what
kind of implementations might break if it were declared that mo is a
synonym of and, therefore, it is recommended that systems interpret mo
like ro and stop any further generation of mo?
Peter Constable
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