Re: [Ltru] Consensus call: extlang

[Leif Halvard Silli <[e-mail]>]

Broome, Karen 2008-05-28 00.09:

> Mark writes: [...]

> • under RFC 4646: "zh, fr" • under this proposal: "zh-cmn, zh,
> fr, zh-cjy;q=0, zh-cpx;q=0, zh-czh;q=0, zh-czo;q=0, zh-gan;q=0,
> zh-hak;q=0, zh-hsn;q=0, zh-mnp;q=0, zh-nan;q=0, zh-wuu;q=0,
> zh-yue;q=0".
> 
> Karen responds: [...]

> But you didn't ask for Mandarin, you asked for Chinese. [...]
> This is where I think we are prioritizing generalized fallback
> over precision in identification -- even if what we are
> precisely identifying is intentionally vague. I lose the
> ability to identify "some kind of Chinese, I don't know what
> kind" if zh is thought to be synonymous with Mandarin. (A real
> need given the history of these tags.) I also will not know
> what the user intended if they use the tag "zh". 


So, keeping 'zh' general, we will know what it meant until now.

> When it becomes possible to tag more specifically, we won't be
> able to know whether the decision to use the more general tag
> ("zh") was a conscious choice or not.


True. We won't know.

> zh is a bad tag; its semantics have always been muddy. We are
> going to rather great lengths to avoid deprecating it.

Then I want to ask: Do you think that we should/could deprecate 
'zh' but still have extlang? And, do you think that all 
macrolanguage tags for which there exist extlang tags -  in 
principle should be deprecated? (Or would you even prefer to 
deprecate the other macrolangauge tags?)

[ Browsers would then need to use the 'zh' in order to match old 
resources, only. (We could perhaps expect e.g server software to 
perform the extra hoop that Apache allready does for browsers 
which asks for 'en-GB' when they should be asking for 'en'. In 
fact Apache would do the same trick if the browser asks for 
'zh-cmn'.) ]

Thus is it so that the fallback that you want is only fallback 
from current tagging to deprecated tagging?
-- 
leif halvard silli
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