Language codes and country codes in (translated) WAI documents

I have consulted my former colleagues who are the Danish experts in Dublin
Core and Meta Data. They say language and Country are two very different
things and we shall use the ISO 639-1 or ISO 639-2 for language codes.
According to Dublin Core one can use either the 2 letter or the 3 letter
code (they explained something about the schema defining end transforming
between the 2 or 3 letter codes, I'm sure some of the Semantic Web- XML -
Meta Data- and Schema folks can explain this to me and others) You can read
more about the language codes on Library of Congress web site
http://www.loc.gov/marc/languages/ and
http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langhome.html  about the ISO639-2
and ISO639-1 standards.  This means in translations one must write either da
or dan for Danish and e.g. en or eng for English and for French: fra (the
terminology code), fre (the bibliographic code) or fr. Are we going to use 2
or 3 letter codes ? What are the W3C/WAI recommendations?

Kind regards
Helle Bjarno
Visual Impairment Knowledge Centre
e-mail: hbj@visinfo.dk
www.visinfo.dk 
phone: +45 39 46 01 04, fax: +45 30 61 94 14
mail: Rymarksvej 1, 2900 Hellerup, Denmark.

Received on Monday, 29 October 2001 06:44:32 UTC