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Re: [idn] Internationalized PTR draft submitted
- To: Marc Tamsky <tamsky@www.tv>, idn@ops.ietf.org
- Subject: Re: [idn] Internationalized PTR draft submitted
- From: Harald Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>
- Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 07:23:00 -0400
- Delivery-date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 07:51:14 -0700
- Envelope-to: idn-data@psg.com
At 20:37 20/09/2000 -0700, Marc Tamsky wrote:
>What's missing from all these PTR proposals is an IANA table that
>binds all languages a 32-bit integer value.
>
>We have /etc/protocols.
>Why not /etc/languagecodes?
what is the win in using a 32-bit entity instead of a string?
in most cases the string (including 1 length byte) will be 1 byte SMALLER
than the 32-bit integer.....
we went through this several years ago on the ietf-languages@iana.org list,
and the conclusion was that it wasn't worth the trouble maintaining the
parallel list of integers and language codes.
(note: there are 3 different agencies APART from IANA that define codes
that are automatically valid as parts of language tags. Maintaining the
parallel number lists would not be a trivial activity.)
after all, if you get the language tag "zh-tw", you can use other
information to tell you that this is Chinese as spoken in Taiwan, while if
you get "1349", you are absolutely up the creek if you haven't downloaded
the latest IANA tables.
(trick question: why shouldn't you use fr-ZR as a language code any more?)
Harald
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, alvestrand@cisco.com
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: Harald@Alvestrand.no