Re: [Ltru] Clarifying Suppress-Script

Hi -

As a technical contributor...

> From: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@icu-project.org>
> To: "McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>
> Cc: "John Cowan" <cowan@ccil.org>; "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>; "LTRU Working Group" <ltru@ietf.org>
> Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2007 10:06 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Clarifying Suppress-Script
...
> On the other hand, whether or not the language code was pre or post 4646
> doesn't seem to make much difference as far as the question of what I should
> do when interpreting these codes, so it seems from that that we should not
> make Suppress-Script depend on pre or post 4646.
...

As I recall, we added Suppress-Script because there was a large body
of already-tagged material which lacked script subtags, and we wanted
to be able to process that material as though it had been given
script subtags.  In this context, suppress-script is only meaningful
for coping with such material.

Somewhere along the way, the language in what became RFC 4646 got a bit
stronger, eventually ending up as "5.  There MUST be at most one script
subtag in a language tag, and the script subtag SHOULD be omitted when
it adds no distinguishing value to the tag or when the primary language
subtag's record includes a Suppress-Script field listing the applicable
script subtag."  This is still OK with me, but...

There seems to be a bit of semantic drift in the understanding of "Suppress-
Script", from its original meaning as a legacy data compatibility kluge
to a way of indicating for a particular language that a script subtag
would probably not add "distinguishing value".  It's clear from this
discussion that not all of us (myself included) have made such a shift.

If we as a WG want to adopt such a semantic shift, we should do so consciously
and explicitly, because it has a dramatic impact on the number of languages
for which the ietf-languages@iana.org list will have to debate the merits of
adding this information to the registry.

Randy

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