Re: Language ranges with more than two sub-tag

On Friday, 1 March 2013 at 09:32, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:

> Hello Marcos,
>  
> There are certainly language tags with more than two sub-tags.  
> zh-Hant-HK (traditional Chinese as used in Hong Kong) would be an  
> example. CLDR (cldr.unicode.org (http://cldr.unicode.org)) and/or LDML  
> (www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/ (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/)) definitely use these for fallbacks in a  
> way similar to what you write about.

These are great. Looking quickly, I see that zh-Hant-TW is also another.   
> I'm sure that you will get some more detailed feedback on this list in  
> the next few hours/days; if not, please write to ietf-languages@iana.org (mailto:ietf-languages@iana.org)  
> or ltru@ietf.org (mailto:ltru@ietf.org), and you will definitely get more information and pointers.

Thanks for those pointers also!    
> It would be great if the SysApp's working group would reuse existing and  
> well-tested mechanisms rather than invent something on their own, but I  
> guess that's why you are writing to us.

Yes, exactly. I'm trying to salvage as much as I can from the i18n model we (i18n WG and WebApps WG) collaborated on a few years ago [1]. However, there are some differences and challenges:  

1) the model is JSON-based, so the XML mechanisms we were relying on don't map too cleanly.  

2) there are two implementations of the JSON i18n model (Google packaged web apps and Mozilla's packaged web apps), so it's kinda already a de facto standard. The model used by Google and Mozilla is what the SysApps WG is trying to standardise on (hopefully without breaking existing content).   

3) The model in [1] has some pretty sophisticated language tag decomposition for language ranges with more than two sub tags. But if there are very few places on the Web that rely on this, it's hard for me to convince implementers to add support.  

So, getting data to support 3 above is really my motivation. I figure if I can get some data showing that there are, in fact, significant populations that rely on language tags composed of three or more sub-tags, then I have stronger case for them to add better i18n support before authors from various locales start running into issues (if they have not already).


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#internationalization-and-localization
  
  
--  
Marcos Caceres

http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Friday, 1 March 2013 09:57:23 UTC