RE: Another attempt at plain language

[Shawn Steele <[e-mail]>]

I could see it being interesting for certain demographics.  Eg: a web site for young students, or targeting ESL folks….  But those sites are going to use the appropriate complexity level regardless of how the content is actually tagged.  It’s also likely that in 99% of the cases alternate (plainer) content won’t be available.

OTOH, if the content is tagged in that detail, perhaps that would confuse systems that are currently used to not seeing such a tag.

And if the valid content/scenarios where differentiation is necessary is actually really low (1% or less), then it’s unlikely that developers will build features to cater to that market.

I don’t object to the principle of such a tag, however I’m a little wary of adding a tag that’s never used.  (almost never).  Right now it seems like a tag a very small number of people would even know about, and those seem to be primarily architect types, not content creators.

Like I said, I don’t object to it if someone really thinks it’s useful.  Personally I think more content would be likely to be tagged -pIqaD (piqd?) if that were available than -plain.

-Shawn

From: Ietf-languages [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of David Starner
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2015 2:43 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Another attempt at plain language

My issue with a tag like this is that for pretty much any other tag, given a decent-sized chunk of text prototypical for that tag, it could be so tagged. It seems fairly easy to disagree about whether even the most prototypical -plain text is actually -plain or if it's just normal.