[Ltru] Re: Description on tags, not just subtags?

["Doug Ewell" <dewell at roadrunner.com>]

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:

> A registration request of a variant recently triggered a discussion on 
> wether we should be able to add Description fields to tags, not just 
> subtags (ignoring the specific issue of grandfathered tags).
>
> For instance, if we use "alsatian" to refer to the variant of 
> alemannic spoken in Alsace (France), we cannot put a:
>
>   Description: Alsatian
>   Description: Els&#xE4;ssisch
>
> to the tag gsw-FR.
>
> Is it a real problem? Should we address it? How?

It might be a real problem, if the dialect or other language variant is 
commonly known by a distinct name (not just, say, "Australian English") 
and if tag users are unlikely to associate the dialect with the name of 
the base language.

In 
http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2008-January/007279.html I 
proposed using the Comments field for this purpose, to avoid introducing 
a new mechanism that would probably be used by only a handful of 
(cherry-picked) variations:

Type: language
Subtag: gsw
Description: Swiss German
Description: Alemannic
Added: 2006-03-08
Suppress-Script: Latn
Comment: gsw-FR represents the Alsatian dialect

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ 



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