Talk:IETF language tag

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THe article contains, as it is today, many mistakes. Here is a summary, written by Doug Ewell:

A few examples:

  "It is written that subtags are separated from each other by a

hyphen. This is not true for the given examples in cases where the subtags are empty. The example is en not en-----."

This statement presupposes that tags can contain "empty subtags," which do not in fact exist. There is only one subtag in the tag "en".

  "The IETF only derives their subtags from ISO standards, they are

therefore not ISO conform."

The RFC 4646 system does not claim to be "ISO-conformant," and explicitly seeks to mitigate some of the instability of the ISO standards, so this statement is a red herring. Country-code TLDs are also not ISO-conformant since they use ".uk" instead of ".gb", and use other extensions to ISO 3166 such as ".ac".

  "It also reserves some tag parts that currently do not exist.

Section 2.2.1, point 4 reads:

      "4. All four-character language subtags are reserved for

possible future standardization.

  "At the same time ISO 15924 is a four-character subtag, all ready."

This is a non sequitur. There is no syntactical or namespace collision between language subtags and script subtags, just as there is none between 2-letter language subtags and region subtags.

  "Since the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 can change from time to time there is

ambiguity in the use. E.g. CS could refer to Serbia and Montenegro or to Czechoslovakia. Section 2.2.4. point 3 C&D solve this. For ambiguous ISO 3166-1 codes the UN M.49 code shall be used."

This is oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy. While ISO code elements may be ambiguous for the reason given, RFC 4646 does not assign a UN M.49-based subtag in place of *each* of the "ambiguous codes," only the more recently assigned. Going forward, if ISO 3166/MA reassigned "CS" to yet another country, that country would get a UN-based subtag but the existing "CS" subtag would not be changed.

I'll be making the necessary factual corrections to the article, but others are of course free to jump in and do it first. I thought it would be good to let the list know that these misconceptions exist and may be widespread, because of the wide use of Wikipedia,

--The above unsigned comment was added by 63.252.121.133 at 15:40 UTC on 19 November 2006.

I've rewritten most of the article. I think my rewrite addresses all your points, but if you see any further problems, just go ahead and edit the article. --Zundark 17:48, 11 March 2007 (UTC)