Re: [Ltru] Last open item

Hi -

As a technical contributor...

> From: "John Cowan" <cowan@ccil.org>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>
> Cc: "LTRU Working Group" <ltru@ietf.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 11:04 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Last open item
...
> Stability in the preferred value isn't the sort of stability that we
> can either expect or preserve, particularly in ISO 3166 code elements.
> What we can and do stabilize is the meaning of subtags: if a source
> standard attempts to assign a code element to a different meaning than
> it once had, we provide a replacement subtag instead of reusing that
> code element.
> 
> Countries will go on changing their names, and 3166/MA (in accordance
> with its mandate) will change their codes accordingly;

Strongly agree, but....

> in order not to
> get out of sync with the rest of the code-using world, we need to track
> those changes insofar as possible.
...

Strongly disagree.

One of the motivations for the formation of this working group was to provide
a way to insulate language tags from what was perceived as excessive instability
in some of the code sources.  As I see it, stability, particularly the stability of
the canonical form of a language tag, is dramatically more important than
staying in sync with other uses of codes coming from the standards we used
to initially populate our registry.  After all, if we're just going to blindly track
the ISO code du jour for every little piece of dirt, there's really little point
to even bothering to put these things in our registry.  If consistency with
other uses of those source specifications trumps stability as a consideration,
then we should throw out our current procedures and registry, just say "see
ISO registry mumble for these codes", and limit our registry and procedures
exclusively to codes for things that ISO hasn't coded.

Otherwise, we will find ourselves in the situation that a tag found to be OK
be a validating processor will suddenly become not OK.  That's simply
not acceptable.

Randy

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