Re: [Ltru] solving the chinese thing... some text (part 1)

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com> wrote:

> From: ltru-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:ltru-bounces at ietf.org] On Behalf Of
> Phillips, Addison
> Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 12:59 PM

> I'd like to propose a series of edits to try and resolve the

> Chinese/macrolanguage thread...

I'm just starting to look at this thread. Some of my comments may already be superseded by discussion I haven't yet looked at; if so, sorry in advance for the distraction.

> I suggest we replace this text:

> ... with this longer text on Chinese:
>
> --
> <t>In particular, the family of languages belonging to the
> macrolanguage Chinese ('zh') call for special consideration. Because
> the written form is very similar for most languages, textual content
> SHOULD use the 'zh' subtag

I'm wondering if SHOULD is even too strong. I think I'd feel more comfortable with something along this line:

"Written Mandarin is widely used, and the subtag 'zh' has most often been used for Mandarin textual content. Other Chinese languages are written in some usage contexts, however, and those written forms are distinct from written Mandarin. Because of prevalent use of 'zh' for written Chinese, it will make sense to use 'zh' for written Chinese in many application scenarios, possibly with a script subtag (indicating...), region or other subtags to indicate some variation. Use of specific, encompassed language subtags is permitted, however, and may be a better choice in some application scenarios. For example, Cantonese video subtitles written with Simplified characters could be tagged 'yue-Hans'; or video subtitles in Taiwanese Mandarin written with Traditional characters could be tagged 'cmn-Hant-TW'."

> <t> Finally, macrolanguage information can be usefully applied when
> searching for content or when providing fallbacks in language
> negotiation. For example, the information that 'yue' has a
> macrolangauge of 'zh' could be used in the Lookup algorithm (<xref
> target="RFC4647"></xref>) to include the range "zh-Hans-CN" as a
> fallback from a request for "yue-Hans-CN" (preserving the script and
> region information) even though the user did not specify "zh-Hans-CN"
> in their request. For the Chinese languages in particular, this
> practice of conflating the encompassed langauge with its macrolanguage
> is RECOMMENDED.</t>

It would probably make sense to mention the use of language priority lists with 'zh' and also a specific encompassed variety to indicate user preferences.

Peter

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