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This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

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Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

¹ This specification defines a form of URN to be used for language tags defined or registered according to RFC 3066. The URN namespace used is 'ietf', defined by RFC 2648 and extended by RFC????.

Table of Contents

1.  Introduction
1.1  Background
2.  Registration template
3.  Examples
4.  IANA considerations
5.  Security considerations
§  References
§  Author's Address
A.  Revision history
A.1  draft-klyne-urn-ietf-lang-00
B.  Todo
§  Full Copyright Statement

1. Introduction

² This specification defines a form of URN to be used for language tags defined or registered according to RFC 3066 [4]. The URN namespace used is 'IETF', defined by RFC 2648 [3] and extended by RFC???? [7] to include names for IETF protocol parameters.

1.1 Background

³ RFC 3066 [4] defines a construction and registry for tags used to identify human languages. These tags can be used to describe the language used by human-readable text, or other data intended for human prsentation.

⁴ [[[In the W3C work on RDF, [5], a generic XML metadata format that uses URIs to identify objects and the relationships between them, there has been some discussion about the identification of language for literal strings. Currently, RDF uses the XML attribute xml:lang, whose value is an RFC 3066 language tag, to identify the language of a literal. It is not clear how this can be represented in the abstract graph model of RDF. The normal form of identification used by RDF (and the Web in general) is a URI or URI-reference as defined by RFC 2396 [2].]]]

⁵ This specification defines a way to embed RFC 3066 language tags in a urn: form of URI, which can be used to identify a language in contexts where a URI is prefered to a text string or token.

2. Registration template

⁶ The URN sub-namespace for language tags is defined as follows.

Registry name:

⁷ language

Specification:

⁸ RFC 3066

Repository:

⁹ http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags

Index value:

¹⁰ The language tag name is the registry index value. RFC 3066 allows this tag name to contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and dash ("-"). Language tags are case-insensitive.

Some allowed language tag values are defined by reference to ISO standard 639 [6].

URN formation:

¹¹ The URN for a language tag is formed as: "urn:ietf:params:languiage:<tag-name>", where <tag-name> is the language registry index value.

RFC 2141 [1] defines the format of URNs. Allowable characters include all of those noted above.

URNs are defined by RFC 2141 [1] as lexically equivalent if they are identical following case normalization of the urn scheme name, the namespace name and any %-escaping used. Language tags are defined such that upper- and lower-case ASCII characters are not distinguished. In forming a URN, all ASCII characters in the language tag must be expressed in lower case.

3. Examples

¹² This table lists some language tags, and the corresponding urn: URIs.

MN (Mongolian)

¹³ urn:ietf:params:language:mn

en-US (American English)

¹⁴ urn:ietf:params:language:en-us

zh-yue (Cantonese)

¹⁵ urn:ietf:params:language:zh-yue

sgn-GB (British sign language)

¹⁶ urn:ietf:params:language:sgn-gb

i-klingon

¹⁷ urn:ietf:params:language:i-klingon

i-default

¹⁸ urn:ietf:params:language:i-default

x-private

¹⁹ urn:ietf:params:language:x-private

4. IANA considerations

²⁰ This document calls for the creation of a new IETF sub-namespace per RFC???? [7]. Registration details are in the preceding section.

5. Security considerations

²¹ No security considerations are introduced by this specification beyond those already inherrent in the use of language tags [4].

References

Author's Address

Appendix A. Revision history

²⁷ (This section to be removed on final publication)

A.1 draft-klyne-urn-ietf-lang-00

²⁸

00a

²⁹ 18-Sep-2001: document initially created.

Appendix B. Todo

³⁰ (This section to be removed on final publication)

• ³¹ Align with urn:ietf:params: draft as it develops.

Full Copyright Statement

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved.

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Acknowledgement

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