RE: Updated article: Two-letter or three-letter language codes

At 23:58 06/09/23, Stephen Deach wrote:
>I just wanted to make sure this "shortest code" issue was considered carefully.
>   A lot of people I've talked to about internationalization issues over the years simply had "assumed" that the 3-letter ISO codes superceded the 2-letter ones, or chose to use all 3-letter codes rather than a mix of 2 & 3 because it was easier to make it a fixed-length field.

IETF language tags always have been variable-length.

>I understand your goal is to eventually make this simpler, by eliminating multiple formats for each subtoken and moving to a single registry/list. 

This is not a matter of future development. RFC 3066,
which sorted out this issue, has been published in January 2001.
Mark's data also seems to show that this is quite well respected.

>As a general process I always try to accept ill-formed input, but emit corrected output (since you pretty much have to grandfather all past formats).

In the case of language tags, this is a very good policy for interfaces
between other systems and the Internet protocols and formats that use
RFC 4646 language tags.

Regards,   Martin.

>At 2006.09.23-11:29(+0900), Martin Duerst wrote:
>>Exactly. Codes should be converted at the boundaries to systems that
>>can't handle anything else that three-letter codes. It has to be done
>>one way, so it can as well be done both ways.
>>
>>Regards,   Martin.
>>
>>At 00:07 06/09/23, Misha Wolf wrote:
>> >
>> >That would be seriously broken.  It would encourage
>> >people to violate BCP 47.
>> >
>> >Misha
>> >
>> >
>> >-----Original Message-----
>> >From: Stephen Deach [mailto:sdeach@adobe.com]
>> >Sent: 22 September 2006 16:05
>> >To: Misha Wolf; Richard Ishida
>> >Cc: www-international@w3.org
>> >Subject: RE: Updated article: Two-letter or three-letter language codes
>> >
>> >I would strongly recomment taht all processing applications support both
>> >2
>> >& 3 letter ISO codes. It was the only way to get some countries and some
>> >
>> >applications (especially in business databases) simply always use the 3
>> >letter coded.
>> >
>> >
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>>
>>
>>#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
>>#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp
>
>
>---Steve Deach
>    sdeach@adobe.com 


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp     

Received on Sunday, 24 September 2006 06:04:01 UTC