Re: [Ltru] my technical position on extlang

Gerard Meijssen 2008-05-25 12.12:

> I am lost when I try to understand you.

Me? This group? Which passage of my letter?

> For me it is simple; with a zh article as it is tagged today, we know
> nothing for sure. It can be anything.

Agree. It can be any Chinese. In theory and in real life. Unfortunatly, 
there doesn't seem to be agreement on this.

> This is the sad truth of the matter. Keeping  the zh tag only
> prolongs this for the content that will be tagged in the future.

I have seen no serious proposal to deprecate it.

> What we need is to understand what the historic tags means and
> interpret it for what it stands for.

I take this to mean that "we must understand that it means 'any Chinese'".

> This interpretation is done best by computers.

If so, then we must be really firm on that it means 'any Chinese'.

> As long as you expect people to be able to tag manually, you do in my
>  opinion best to cut this gordian knot. This leaves you with ends of
> rope that you can call "cmn" "yue" et all.

There is much in this, I feel. My involvement in this debate began with 
a message to the W3-I18N mailinglist, where I claimed that there are too 
many tags for Norwegian and that people don't get it.

Unfortuntaly, it is hard to get agrement on how the automatic should work.

> When you are sure that people use software that hides the issues
> involved, that present the choises in natural language, then and only
> then does it not matter what the codes say, they could even be a
> binary code.

So, do you mean that 'zh' should always be included, if you select any 
of the Chinese encompassed languages?
-- 
leif halvard silli

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