Re: Proposal to postpone tex-02

I don't feel strongly enough to argue this at length, but on balance I 
would favour not including a feature that is not universally applicable 
into the RDF core.  If necessary, it would be for higher layers to decide 
whether or not two different language tags should be treated similarly for 
some purpose.

#g
--

At 13:21 28/03/2003 +0000, Jeremy Carroll wrote:



>Graham Klyne wrote:
>
>>I would argue to reject rather than postpone this issue, for reasons set 
>>out in my response [1].
>
>i.e.
>[[[
>
>I would oppose this change because this behaviour is explicitly 
>discouraged by RFC 3066:
>[[
>2.4 Meaning of the language tag
>
>    The language tag always defines a language as spoken (or written,
>    signed or otherwise signaled) by human beings for communication of
>    information to other human beings.  Computer languages such as
>    programming languages are explicitly excluded.  There is no
>    guaranteed relationship between languages whose tags begin with the
>    same series of subtags; specifically, they are NOT guaranteed to be
>    mutually intelligible, although it will sometimes be the case that
>    they are.
>]]
>-- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt
>]]]
>but the same RFC says:
>
>
>[[
>2.5 Language-range
>
>    Since the publication of RFC 1766, it has become apparent that there
>    is a need to define a term for a set of languages whose tags all
>    begin with the same sequence of subtags.
>
>    The following definition of language-range is derived from HTTP/1.1
>    [RFC 2616].
>
>              language-range  = language-tag / "*"
>
>    That is, a language-range has the same syntax as a language-tag, or
>    is the single character "*".
>
>    A language-range matches a language-tag if it exactly equals the tag,
>    or if it exactly equals a prefix of the tag such that the first
>    character following the prefix is "-".
>
>    The special range "*" matches any tag.  A protocol which uses
>    language ranges may specify additional rules about the semantics of
>    "*"; for instance, HTTP/1.1 specifies that the range "*" matches only
>    languages not matched by any other range within an "Accept-Language:"
>    header.
>
>    NOTE: This use of a prefix matching rule does not imply that language
>    tags are assigned to languages in such a way that it is always true
>    that if a user understands a language with a certain tag, then this
>    user will also understand all languages with tags for which this tag
>    is a prefix.  The prefix rule simply allows the use of prefix tags if
>    this is the case.
>
>]]
>
>which supports tex.
>Also we should defer to I18N on whether this is useful or not. We could 
>ask I18N to endorse or not tex's comment on this issue.
>
>Jeremy

-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E

Received on Friday, 28 March 2003 08:44:26 UTC