[Ltru] Too fine-grained? (was: Re: Uniqueness of variant subtags)

["Doug Ewell" <doug at ewellic.org>]

When we talk about registering year-based variants for minor revisions 
of an orthography, or other regulatable aspect of a language, we should 
keep in mind some of the main reasons we have language tags in the first 
place:

1. to allow people to identify the language of content

2. to allow people or computers to search for content in a particular 
language

3. to allow people to specify "preferred languages" in which they wish 
to receive content

The finer-grained our language tagging solutions become, such as 
"no-1907" versus "no-1917", the less likely it is that all of these use 
cases will be met.  Remember that this group has a history of assuming 
the lowest common denominator among searching and matching engines. 
(That's why we have Suppress-Script, because we think many searching and 
matching engines won't know to strip the script subtag from 
"de-Latn-AT".)

So before we assume that we'll eventually have lots of 1917's and 1959's 
and 1994's colliding with each other, and need to make sure all of them 
can coexist, we might want to think about whether these are distinctions 
that need to be made in language tags.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, 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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