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Re: Language Identifier List Criteria

From: by way of Martin Duerst <gschweizer@gmx.at>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 21:31:48 +0900
Message-Id: <6.0.0.20.2.20041221213144.07ac8908@localhost>
To: www-international@w3.org




Mark Davis wrote:

>You keep expressing this in a counterproductive way. The language tag
>'de-AT' is reasonably defined: German as used in Austria.

Political borders don$BCU(B always run along language variations.
A language-region tag is generally understood as the current official 
standard of the language in the corresponding country.

The tag "de-AT" clearly does not mean *any* German as used in Austria, it 
refers to Austrian Standard German.

For example, in the context of a spell checking software you may expect the 
following:
- current official Austrian orthography ("neue amtliche Rechtschreibung"),
- as currently taught in Austrian schools,
- as defined in the Austrian Dictionary ("$B%h(Bsterreichisches W$B‹S(Bterbuch"),
- common practice in Austrian newspapers,
- etc.

In my opinion the list should include only tags for which such distinct 
conventions exist (which is apparently not the case for de-LI).

Georg
Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2004 12:46:26 GMT

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