Doug Ewell 2008-10-03 15.13:
Leif Halvard Silli <lhs at malform dot no> wrote"It is interesting to compare the prefixes allowed for "1996", Prefix: deNot *allowed*, but *recommended*. The first means that we say you SHOULD use 'de' (and implicitly, SHOULD NOT use any other primary language subtag) with '1996'.But the question still is why the registry does not say which regions tags "1996" is recommended used for.The Registry doesn't currently include region subtags as part of any Prefix field. In fact, 'wadegile', which will be submitted to IANA today, is the first variant whose Prefix will comprise anything other than a language subtag and (optionally) one or more variant subtags.The big danger with variants is using two or more that are mutually exclusive. '1901' and '1996' are mutually exclusive; there is no logical way in which both could ever be used in the same tag. To steer people away from this, when a tag with two variants does make sense, we explicitly indicate variant A as part of the Prefix for variant B. The sub-dialects and '1994' sub-sub-dialect of Resian are examples of this.
Unless we say that year digits should only be used to "date" an existing language or norm - and not itself serve as reference to a any language or norm - we could claim that 1996 is a modification of 1901. And thus we could claim that "de-1901-1996" would be meaningful. (Though redundant.)
So if wadegile would be modified in the future, one could register a year for the new - or the old (or both) - revision, which would have to be preceded by the wadegile subtag. (Allthough, in real life, one could probably just skip adding the year subtag.)
The same would be the case for the groene and witte boekje for the Dutch language: Allthough there are new revisions of those books, the most important thing would probably be to be able to tag whether one uses the one or the other.
By keeping a strict year meaning to year subtags, we can help that registrants avoid such things [that I proposed] as 1996groene and 1996witte.
There is usually less of a problem using region or script subtags together with a variant. This does not mean the resulting tag necessarily corresponds to a real-world language variation, such as "en-IN-boont", but that it is not logically impossible in the sense that "de-1901-1996" would be.
This to me suggests to that, in reality, there is consesus that year subtags are strictly to be understood as years. Or else, as mentioned above, "de-1901-1996" could be meaningful.
In many cases, trying to enumerate the possible region subtags which would make sense with a given variant would be a huge researching challenge, and might become the subject of perpetual complaints of incompleteness even more than Suppress-Script already is.
Whether it is a huge undertaking or not, must be researched first of all, in each case. For "1996", it was an agreement between 4 countries, so it should be pretty simple to conclude.
Further more, we do agree that one should not make tags longer than necessary. But the fact of the matter is that a presice listing of the region tags for which a year (or other) subtag applies, could help keeping tags short.
How? Well, as you know, people add their own meanings into things, and could very well "figure out" that "de-NO" would be fine, since I live in Norway. But if they see that, "oh, it is not recommended to use "de-NO-1996", then this could lead to a very good thing, namely that the tagger would pick a more approriate tag, such as "de-1996" or "de-DE-1996". If you get what I mean.
For Wade-Giles and (maybe someday) Hanyu Pinyin, we will specify a Prefix consisting of 'zh' with a script subtag (and not without one) as a fairly explicit indication that the variant really should be used with that script subtag.
That sounds very meaningful.
This is inherently open to debate for each proposed variant, and I am sure ietf-languages will hold such debates whether we add a rule or not, so I do not support adding a new rule to attempt to regulate this behavior, especially not if we are trying to get through a Last Call.
Of course it must be open to debate - we cannot know in advance what one want to register and how it relatest to "reality". And I do not think that the current lack of recommended region subtag prefixes for 1996 is a fundamental error. But I do think that it would be much more in line with the strict year meaning that you apply to "-1996" to list the region variants of "de" for which the 1996 dating is good.
-- leif halvard silli _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
Note Well: Messages sent to this mailing list are the opinions of the senders and do not imply endorsement by the IETF.