Re: Internationalization Core Working Group-ISSUE-4: Language tag references [WOFF]

On Wednesday, December 15, 2010, 5:52:17 PM, Internationalization wrote:

ICWGIT> Internationalization Core Working Group-ISSUE-4: Language tag references [WOFF]

ICWGIT> http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/4

ICWGIT> Raised by: Richard Ishida
ICWGIT> On product: WOFF

ICWGIT> 6.2.1 Extended Metadata Block
ICWGIT> http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF/#Metadata

ICWGIT> WG Reviewed: Yes

Thanks for your comment, which is being tracked by the WebFonts WG at
http://dev.w3.org/webfonts/WOFF/DoC/issues-lc-2010.html#issue-10


ICWGIT> "The possible values for the lang attribute can be found in
ICWGIT> the IANA Subtag Registry [Subtag]."

ICWGIT> This implies that you can only use single subtags, since that
ICWGIT> is what the registry contains (with the exception of a few
ICWGIT> undesirable redundant and grandfathered tags.)  

Thanks for pointing this out. You are correct that this is undesirable, and unintentional.

ICWGIT> We think this should actually say:

ICWGIT> "The possible values for the lang attribute MUST conform to BCP 47."

Yes, that would be the more usual way to say this and consistent with what other W3C specifications do. I propose that we accept this comment as-is.

This change adds to the list of languages, but does not have any impact on existing deployed content. Content with lang="en" continues to be fine, but now you can say lang="en-US" for example. I'm fairly sure that this was the original intent anyway.

ICWGIT> An there should be an entry for BCP 47 in the  References section.

Yes, that would be a natural consequence of your proposed change.

(For those unfamiliar with IETF terminology, BCP is a Best Current Practice document and intended to be a stable reference. At any given time it points to one or more IETF RFCs, and the ones it points to may be updated over time as one RFC supercedes another.

ICWGIT> Similarly, the sentence

ICWGIT> " A user agent displaying metadata is expected to choose a
ICWGIT> preferred language/locale to display from among those
ICWGIT> available, following RFC 4647 [RFC-4647]."

ICWGIT> Would be better as 

ICWGIT> "A user agent displaying metadata is expected to choose a
ICWGIT> preferred language/locale to display from among those
ICWGIT> available,  following a matching algorithm such as the lookup
ICWGIT> algorithm specified in BCP 47 (currently RFC 4647)."

Yes, this is better wording, and more stable as it does not need to be updated in the future if RFC 4647 is updated. Yet in terms of implementations, it means the same thing so there is no change to code there.





-- 
 Chris Lilley   Technical Director, Interaction Domain                 
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead, Fonts Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG
 Member, CSS, WebFonts, SVG Working Groups

Received on Wednesday, 12 January 2011 14:27:01 UTC