E.164 has several advantages: - it is network oriented - area codes are highly granular and documented- it is population oriented as more and more people get a phone or a mobile, even in difficult countries like Ertihrea
... and we work on a reference grid which will address this which makes me biaised.
jfc At 07:44 11/05/2005, Doug Ewell wrote:
> This comes from comment 22 in > http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00540.html > which states: > > "22. 2.2.4: I understand that all the regional language differences of > the world are to be supported by the ISO 3166 alpha-3/digit-3 list. > This means that regions like NY, TX or California are not entitled a > code but the 56 persons of Pitcairn Island yes? I doubt that disparity > can hold very long, all the more than ISO 3166-2 provides all the > possibilities for a far more adequate granularity." > > As pointed out in message > http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00628.html > the draft also supports UN M.49 digit-3 codes > > Based on recent discussion, can I close this with a "reject"? I agree to reject. But I think this one needs some comment, since I was once a supporter of ISO 3166-2 in language tags, and have often cited regional differences in en-US as potentially worthy of tagging. Neither ISO 3166-2 nor any other geographic coding system -- UN/LOCODE, MARC 21, FIPS 10-4, HASC, any of them -- can partition the world perfectly and unequivocally in terms of language variation, partly because experts will never agree completely on what constitutes a "significant" language variation, and partly because such systems never guarantee equality as to the area or population of the encoded regions. ISO 3166-2 assigns a single code to California (population 33 million) and another to New York state (population 19 million), but it also assigns 21 codes to the Bahamas (population 303,000) -- one for each of the pre-1996 districts. This is far from ideal in terms of providing consistent coding granularity. Other geocoding systems have similar limitations. ISO 3166-2 also suffers from inadequate stability for the type of tagging mechanism described in the draft. Code elements are added, removed, and changed (both description and code element) with little or no publicity. Occasionally the entire subdivision structure on which ISO 3166-2 code elements are based is thrown out and replaced with a new one; this happened with Libya in 2003 and Slovenia in 2002. Variant subtags can always be proposed to distinguish regional differences in language that cannot be described adequately with ISO 3166-1 and UN M.49 region subtags. -- Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at lists.ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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