Re: Language tag education and negotiation

On Mon, April 28, 2008 11:21 am, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>
Andrew Cunningham 2008-04-26 08.45:
> 
>> For instance
as indicated already in this thread, some users might want
>>
to give a higher
>> priority to Swedish, and web browsers
automatically making assumptions
>> on
>> how to
treat Norwegian issues may negatively impact on such users.
>>
> 
> I must disagree strongly. The spesific
example I mentioned was an edge
> case of grownups who are so in
disagreement with the Bokmål predominance
> of Norway that
they choose to live in a partly Swedish mileu instead. (A
> few
years on, and I guess they are back to a Norwegian mileu, in some
> form.) The example could be best be compared to the Italian
Albanians
> which  John mentioned. Imagine that one such speaker
of the Albanian
> form used in Italia decided to be
"Great-Albaninan" - at least in the
> linguistic terms -
and thus decided to prefer Albanian Albanian over
> Italian, even
though his own tongue was Arbëreshë Albanian and he was
> fluent in Italian. That is what my edge example can be compared
to.
> 
> If you take the stance that the most important
thing is that everone can
> do as they wish, then there is nothing
much to educate anyone about.
> 

Lets see, a different
example, then.

Some of my friends speak a language Dinka
(ISO-639-2 language code din).

In ISO-639-3 it is represented
by the language codes dip, diw, dib, dks, dik

each of them will
have preferences to which language code they'd prefer and what order they
would be in.

An added level of complexity would be fall back
language

some would prefer "en" as a fall back

some would prefer  "ar" as a fall back. Some would
oppose any "ar" content at any cost. Some  would wnat to
fallback to "ar" then "en".

some would
prefer "sw-KE" as a fallback and then "en"

It would be useful to set up a server or a web browser to have useful
defaults. But in either case both the the server and browser
configurations need to be customisable by individuals.

For lesser
used and minority languages, customisation is critical. The reality is
when it comes to using the web the burden of knowledge is often placed on
lesser used languages.

not just with language tagging but in
many other aspects of the web as well.

Andrew
-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development Coordinator
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc@vicnet.net.au