Re: [Ltru] Re: Registry change of the day: prefix with more than one subtag

[Addison Phillips <[e-mail]>]

Doug Ewell wrote:
> 
> <<
> Most variants that share a prefix are mutually exclusive. For example, 
> the German orthographic variations '1996' and '1901' SHOULD NOT be used 
> in the same tag, as they represent the dates of different spelling 
> reforms. A variant that can meaningfully be used in combination with 
> another variant SHOULD include a 'Prefix' field in its registry record 
> that lists that other variant. For example, if another German variant 
> 'example' were created that made sense to use with '1996', then 
> 'example' should include two Prefix fields: "de" and "de-1996".
>>>
> 
> A human can easily see that "de-1901-1996" and "sl-rozaj-njiva" are 
> meaningless, because the variants are clearly contradictory.  But a few 
> variants with the same prefix can in fact be used together, such as 
> "en-scouse-fonipa" or "en-boont-fonipa".  

Uh... fonipa has no prefix, so it doesn't share a prefix with either 
scouse or boont.

In fact, 'fonipa' and 'fonupa'
> have no prefix and can thus theoretically be used with any tag, but some 
> combinations like "el-monoton-fonipa" are inappropriate nonetheless.

Yep. We have no mechanism for saying this. This would fall under the 
rubric of "Tag Content Wisely"
> 
> At http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/prefix-anomaly.html you can find an 
> illustration of this situation.  The drop-down list of variant subtags 
> for "sl-rozaj" shows not only the reasonable choices, like 'fonipa' (no 
> prefix) and 'njiva' (prefix = "sl-rozaj"), but also the inappropriate 
> 'nedis' (prefix = "sl").

Ur... nedis and rozaj share a prefix and thus fall under the general 
exclusion rule.

> 
> What information is available in either RFC 4646(bis) or in the Registry 
> that would help software to make this decision?  Does a prefix of 
> "language with no variant" mean that the variant should not be used in 
> the presence of any other variant?  

That is, in fact, what the RFC says. How else should we interpret:

 > Most variants that share a prefix are mutually exclusive.

How does one determine that
> "en-scouse-fonipa" is OK while "el-monoton-fonipa" is not?

Not via Prefixes. I'll note that "el-AQ-monoton" is also a dubious 
choice. There is an upper limit to the amount of information we can pack 
into the registry, I think. We could add the following text after the 
quoted paragraph though:

--
Some variants have no Prefix or have several different primary language 
prefixes. Such variants might be useful in combination with other, 
similar variants or with variants specific to a given language. This 
isn't always true and care is called for in selecting between these 
subtags. For example, a tag like "el-monoton-fonipa" is probably 
ill-considered, since both 'monoton' (Monotonic Greek) and 'fonipa' 
(International Phonetic Alphabet) can't both be used to transcribe the 
same document at the same time.
--

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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