Re: Proposal to postpone tex-02

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

Received on Friday, 28 March 2003 08:22:20 UTC