Doug Ewell wrote:
> I really should write to Clive Feather and thank him for his
> clear and accurate page that served as my unofficial source.
ACK - after his 240 KB nntpext-base-27 monster draft I won't
forget his name.
> We only care about code elements valid as of 1988. The point
> is that *somebody else* might care about code elements going
> back to the original 1974 version
Oh, yes, of course. There's even a group trying to "invent"
historical codes for obsolete regions. And I also care about
obscure region codes in my "rxwhois" script, codes like EA, EH,
FX, or existing ccTLDs like AC, AX, etc.
But that's about public whois servers, not language tags.
> We were never able to see eye to eye on whether (a) the
> likelihood that ISO 3166/MA would reuse these codes was
> greater than (b) the likelihood that there's a language
> tag somewhere that uses it
In theory we could compute it, 26*26 - private use codes,
changes over the last 30 years, so far three (?) collisions
with old codes (GE, SK, CS) => one collision per decade, so
let's say in about 1000 years all region codes in language
tags are either numeric or deprecated.
OTOH the frequency of the 1766 / 3066 / 3066bis updates was
shorter than 3166-1 collisions so far.
> Before the Web there were bulletin boards and the "file
> areas" of CompuServe forums, where you could get the same
> private copies.
Yes, but using region codes in laguage tags was invented 1995,
before that time we only had locales like en-UK and of course
ccTLDs. FidoNet had zone and region numbers at this time, on
top of an older system with only net and node numbers.
> EVEN NOW, there is a list of language codes on the Unicode
> Web site that says, in reference to pairs of codes like
> "he, iw*" where the latter was deprecated 16 years ago
Yes, one of your pet peeves, I'm more worried about my region
code zoo, because it changes more frequently. Actually I'm
more interested in TLDs, the problems aren't exactly the same
as for language codes. Slightly different POV => slightly
different conclusions. Nobody proposes to use TP instead of
TL, they just need some time for the transition.
> I thought you said before that we had changed lots of things,
> mostly to your satisfaction.
Yes, lots of details like the ABNF, references, record-jar,
etc., but in essence it's still what you had last year.
Plus "Suppress-Script", 2047-compatibility, and better rules
for the region code zoo. If we still missed something really
important let's hope that the "IETF last call" finds it. Or
in other words Bruce Lilly ;-)
Bye, Frank
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