- From: Glenn Adams <glenn@stonehand.com>
- Date: Wed, 1 Nov 95 09:14:07 -0500
- To: Balint Nagy Endre <bne@bne.ind.eunet.hu>
- Cc: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>, http WG <http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
>Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 03:18:08 +0100 (MET)
>From: "Balint Nagy Endre" <bne@bne.ind.eunet.hu>
>
>but unfortunately Lynx doesn't support that. (NOTE: I don't know, what is
>the proper language tag for russian, I assumed "ru" but it is only a
>(bad) guess.) Others may have a significantly longer list of languages.
RFC 1766 (which specifies the structure of the value of ACCEPT-LANGUAGE
and other headers which take language tag values) specifies that 2 character
language tags follow ISO 639 for which see:
http://www.stonehand.com/unicode/standard/iso639.html
However, since ISO 639 contains only 136 tags, the authors of the HTML I18N
I-D have specified an extension such that three character language tags
follow the language identifiers specified by the Ethnologue, 12th Edition,
which contains 6790 3-character tags, for which, see:
http://www.stonehand.com/unicode/standard/ethn12.html
For more information on the Ethnologue, see:
gopher://sil.org:70/11/gopher_root/ethnologue/
I would recommend that the HTTP specifications also be amended to specify
the same convention for using three character language identifiers since
this convention will be employed by HTML in specifying the value of the LANG
attribute.
Regards,
Glenn Adams
Received on Wednesday, 1 November 1995 07:23:21 UTC