[Ltru] Re: ISO 639-2 decision: "mis"

Randy Presuhn <randy underscore presuhn at mindspring dot com> wrote:

>> MARC is an application context -- an application of language tags, not an 
>> application in the sense of a piece software. In that application 
>> context, only IDs from 639-2 can be used: that is a constraint on the 
>> range of language tags supported in that application context.
>
> As such, I'd argue that these constraints mean it isn't an application of 
> BCP 47.

I agree with Randy on this.  Section 2.2 of RFC 4646 says, "The Language 
Subtag Registry maintained by IANA is the source for valid subtags."  That 
is clear and unequivocal.

There will, of course, be systems and applications that are not fully 
conformant to BCP 47, with which conformant applications will have to 
interoperate, and that is fine and expected.  Those systems will impose 
their own restrictions.  Perhaps the worst cases are the simple-minded 
applications that assume a language tag must consist of a 2-letter language 
optionally followed by a hyphen and a 2-letter country, which isn't even 
conformant to RFC 1766.

But we are talking about making a change *to BCP 47 itself* that specifies 
the use of "mis" when the full Registry is not available, and that is not 
right.  Applications that have such a restriction, such as MARC apparently, 
do not attempt to conform to BCP 47, and so there is no point in putting 
text in BCP 47 that makes their limitations conformant.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

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