[Ltru] my technical position on extlang

Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> Sun, 18 May 2008 01:47 UTC

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Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 10:45:39 +0900
To: LTRU Working Group <ltru@ietf.org>
From: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
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Subject: [Ltru] my technical position on extlang
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As a technical contributor, this is my technical position on extlang:

To me, the very recent discussion has shown that going back to
extlangs is preferable. The main reason for this, for me, is that
it's easier to explain and deploy. There are very few people,
even on this list, who can exactly explain why and where extlangs
pose problems, and why they might be (somewhat) less desirable
than not having them in some circumstances. On the other hand,
explaining to people that zh is Chinese, zh-yue is Cantonese, and
zh-cmn is Mandarin, seems more straightforward. Designing good
standards and good technology means looking at all the details,
but then going back to make sure the big picture is right.

In my understanding, one of the main points against extlangs was
that the "remove from the right" fallback hierarchy may not be
right. That may or may not be true, depending on the case at hand,
but that may or may not be true also for the relative order of
script and region. Here, there is an advantage of having the
hierarchy in the tag. More advanced matching algorithms can be
developped without having to do registry lookup.

So as a consequence, I personally favor going back to using
extlangs, preferably exclusively.

I'm okay with using extlangs only for those cases that already
have a macrolanguage subtag currently available, or some other
reasonable, not too 'cherry-picky' cutoff.

I'm opposed to allowing both extlang and independent tags
(i.e. both zh-yue and yue), but if that's what we as a WG
decide, I can live with it.


Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp     

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