Re: [Ietf-languages] Fwd: I-D Action: draft-msporny-d-langtag-ext-00.txt

["Doug Ewell" <[e-mail]>]

Manu Sporny wrote:
 
> There is a time pressure here. Our i198n concerns have been hanging
> out there for more than 9 months and our WG charter is up in a couple
> of months. We need to wrap this up in 3 weeks. Or to put it another
> way, if we don't wrap this up in 3 weeks, we won't be addressing this
> issue, which would be a shame.
 
I know it is flippant to say "that's not our problem," and I apologize in advance for that, but trying to push through this extension quickly, without consulting or even notifying the language-tagging community, does not seem to me an appropriate way to compensate for this lapse. It was only by chance that Martin happened to spot this I-D and was able to bring it to our attention.
 
Apparently Addison did know about this effort, and is credited in the Acknowledgements section of the I-D, but it would be nice if the author(s) of an extension proposal would check in with ietf-languages as part of their effort. RFC 5646 does not require this; I wish it did. The IETF at large and W3C are not experts in this field, and probably will not be able to detect significant operational problems in such a proposal.
 
> In any case, if you're going to engage in this discussion, the issue
> #3 above is probably the place to do it.
 
I believe THIS LIST is the place to discuss this I-D. (Definitely not on some GitHub account.)
 
I have other questions and/or concerns, some of which overlap with Martin's:
 
1. In the proposal's lone example, the Arabic script is a right-to-left script. How does "ar-d-rtl" indicate right-to-left directionality in a way that "ar-Arab" does not?
 
2. Given #1, and given that the script subtag 'Arab' is a Suppress-Script for the language subtag 'ar' (which means "ar" is equivalent to "ar-Arab" for almost all purposes), how is "ar" not sufficient? I agree with Martin's comment here: what rendering process is likely to display Arabic left-to-right?
 
3. I also agree with Martin that the definition "automatically detected" for subtag 'auto' is not adequate. How does it differ from leaving off the D extension altogether?
 
4. Scripts exist in other directionalities besides LTR and RTL. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean can be written top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Mongolian in Mongolian script is properly written top-to-bottom, left-to-right, but is sometimes (although incorrectly) rendered LTR as well. Some languages have been written boustrophedon, either with or without reversing the glyphs when transitioning from LTR to RTL. None of these scenarios are covered in the proposal, but some of them seem much more in need of explicit marking than the Arabic example.
 
5. Given #4, the lack of a registry for the proposed extension, or even the mention of one, is a significant problem. The set of exactly 3 values associated with this extension ('ltr', 'rtl', and 'auto') would be fixed; adding to it would require updating the RFC, which is much more work than updating a registry.
 
Without these issues being addressed in a satisfactory way, I would lobby IETF not to approve this I-D.
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org