Re: [Ltru] Uniqueness of variant subtags

[Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com>]

+1

-----Original Message-----
From: ltru-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:ltru-bounces at ietf.org] On Behalf Of Randy Presuhn
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 10:37 AM
To: LTRU Working Group
Subject: Re: [Ltru] Uniqueness of variant subtags

Hi -

As a technical contributor...

I'm deeply concerned that this thread is leading to a seriously
over-specified, over-engineered solution.  There are several
different concerns that folks appear to be trying to address,
and I'm afraid that the net effect of the proposals might be worse
than the envisioned problems.

(1) making "institution" mnemonics part of the formal structure
logically leads to the conclusion that there should be a registry of
institutions.  I really don't want to go there!

(2) the "same meaning" vs "same semantics" debate gets to the
heart of why I so strongly opposed using the same variant tag
for the Hanyu Pinyin orthography of Mandarin and a pinyin-like
way of writing Tibetan.  Our job is to define procedures to keep
the registry running smoothly so that language tagging needs
can be met.  How does each interpretation effect the operation
of the review process and registry?  How would each impact
the developer communities of products that employ language
tags?  Would either approach make any difference to the people
using those languages?

(3) With respect to the "year" business, at some point we have
to stop gilding this lily with more and more advice and recognize
that as more and more variant subtags are registered, it will
become increasingly likely that the character string used for
the variant will end up having little or no mnemonic value.  Tough.
It's unrealistic at this late stage in the process to come up with an
architecture for the construction of variant subtags.  Doing so
will only increases the amount of time spent arguing about
the "right" string to use for a particular variant.  THEY ARE JUST
SUBTAGS, and we should *NOT* do anything to foster the
perception that they are anything more.

Randy

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