Re: New RFC 4645-4647 (language tags)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Sep 11 2006 - 04:53:30 CDT

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    Note that the IANA website still does not refer to the new RFCs for the "Language Tags" category on http://www.iana.org/numbers.html
    (it still refers to the draft "RFC-ietf-ltru-registry-14.txt", instead of RFC4645)

    The legacy registry files are however updated to read "OBSOLETE":

    * Language Tags - OBSOLETE
    http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags
    * Language Tags Directory - OBSOLETE
    http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tag-apps

    The new "Language Tag Extensions Registry" is still empty today (just a date line).
    http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tag-extensions-registry;
    It seems that there are already many <langext> subtags used (notably for Chinese and Arabic spoken dialects, unless they are considered variants, ordered after the script, something that I think is inappropriate, given that any trans-script, other than Han and Arabic scripts respectively, requires knowing the dialect to select a significant language, even if those languages are unified in the most common script; I would see variants used in Han mostly for making distinctions between competing transcription systems or standards).

    And there are important missing comments for the source of information (which standard number?) in subtags for languages and regions, according to the rules defined in RFC4645. I think that these source standard should be specified to provide the rule underwhich the subtags were registered (no need to specify the version date of these standards, given that this should be OK for the date of registration), but it will ease tracking the dependencies of the registered subtags with those standards and how this affects the stability of the registry (just consider now the case of Serbia, and of Montenegro, separate countries for which there's still no separate assignment, except possibly the UN M.49 region numbers)



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