Re: [Ltru] Re: Fallback vs. Macrolanguage?

Peter Constable wrote:
> 
>> An "official" "fallback mapping" somewhere (ISO 639-something?) would
>> be very useful.
> 
> I disagree. A user with a system set for Breton as the 
 > preferred UI language might want to fallback to French or
 > Japanese or Swahili -- it all depends on the user. Perhaps
 > French is a reasonable default that could be assumed in
 > that case in the absence of other information, but that's
 > just one case. What is the fallback for German in Switzerland?
 > What is the fallback for Hindi in India? What is the
 > fallback for Inuktitut, or Filipino?
> 
> 

+1

I think the Breton example has been beaten to pieces. If my application 
wishes to associate French as the fallback for Breton when Breton is not 
available, that's my application's business. Your application may do 
otherwise. At the BCP 47 level we should avoid making any attempt at 
making mappings like this at all normative.

More to the point: mappings of this nature are someone's guess as to 
what an appropriate fallback would be absent further information from 
the user. It would be unsurprising if, for a Web application, other 
information would also applied in that case. All of this is outside the 
realm of RFC 4647's algorithms (except to say they are examples of 
'implementation defined defaults' in the Lookup algorithm).

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

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