Re: [Ltru] RFC4645 to Historic status

[Doug Ewell <[e-mail]>]

Timothy Mcsweeney wrote:

> I looked at your website Doug and I find it ironic that on your list
> of trophy RFC's, there is no RFC4645 listed.  I can only speculate
> that you yourself also think the document is of such low value that
> you made the deliberate decision to exclude it from appearing next to
> its stablemates.  So why not get rid of it??

First, they aren't "trophy RFCs," in the sense of ones that I wrote or co-wrote or otherwise contributed to. The RFCs linked on my site are those that specify the current state of how BCP 47 language tagging works. There are also links to other current, relevant BCP 47 resources.

RFC 5645 is the only one of the RFCs that I wrote, and it's only there because -- as I explained in a previous message -- it describes why the assignment of extended language subtags depends on the relevant macrolanguage. That is a process step not covered in 5646. Otherwise 5645 would not appear on that list, as 4645 does not.

4645 and 5645 were of significant value in two ways:

(1) to explain how the then-new Language Subtag Registry was populated and updated, at a time when users of language tags had to scour the Web for informal and outdated copies of ISO 639 and 3166 to find subtag values, and

(2) as a vehicle to transmit the initial Registry to IANA, so they could post it at the link we see today, which has remained the same ever since.

Neither of these functions is relevant in 2023 to normal use of BCP 47. That does not make the documents obsolete, in the sense that users need to be warned not to use them because an updated version exists, because they are not the specification, and they state very clearly up front that they are not the specification.

As for "why not get rid of it??", please re-read Randy Presuhn's comment about the procedural effort required to reclassify a document to Historic. If you've ever worked with IETF, you understand the importance of prioritization and bandwidth constraints.

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org