Subject: Re: New Last Call: 'Tags for Identifying Languages' to BCP

From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 08:10:44 -0500

>  Date: 2004-12-14 23:35
>  From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
>  To: Doug Ewell <[email-masked]>
>  CC: [email-masked]
>  
> Doug Ewell scripsit:
> 
> 
> > * Region subtag 830, "Channel Islands," is based on a UN M.49 code.
> > Since that is an English-only standard, one must look elsewhere to find
> > the French translation (it's not what you might expect, either).
> 
> In fact, M.49 is available in all six official U.N. languages; it's
> just the *online* version that's English-only.

No, I am quite certain (because I looked!) that the UN M.49 lists
are available online as HTML-ized English and HTML-ized French. It's
certainly not English-only (the online version might reasonably be
called HTML-only, but that's another story).

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---

From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 20:21:07 -0500

>  Date: 2004-12-14 16:01
>  From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
>  To: [email-masked]

> The "grandfathered" production in the RFC 3066bis ABNF is intended only
> for the 24 entries (not 46, as I wrote earlier) that are carried over
> from the RFC 3066 registry and that don't otherwise conform to the RFC
> 3066bis syntax.  Take a look at the items marked "grandfathered" in the
> proposed registry:
> 
> http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/lstreg.html
> 
> If you can write a reasonable "grandfathered" production in ABNF that
> will allow this set of tags and no others, such that the ABNF can be
> used without also referring to the prose, then I salute you.

If there really are only 24 items of less than 11 octets each,
a trivial solution is to simply list them (with the usual ABNF
syntax) as literal strings.  That should take no more than a
half-dozen lines.

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:54:33 -0500

>>>>> "Bruce" == Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]> writes:

    Bruce> If there really are only 24 items of less than 11 octets
    Bruce> each, a trivial solution is to simply list them (with the
    Bruce> usual ABNF syntax) as literal strings.  That should take no
    Bruce> more than a half-dozen lines.

Perhaps.  I actually find a lot of ABNF specs are not as clear as they
could be to humans because they are trying to describe the valid
inputs as strictly as possible.  In many cases I think the spec would
be more clear if the ABNF were relaxed and other constraints were
expressed at appropriate levels.

---

From: "Brian Rosen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 14:56:55 -0500

I don't have any comment on the issue of language tags, but speaking as a
reasonably avid ABNF hacker, I agree with Sam, and would not want to
establish a convention that ABNF in IETF RFCs is expected to be precise.
One MUST read the text to understand what the limits of the syntax are.
This is especially true with repetitions.  It's usually tortuous to write
ABNF that limits repetitions or string lengths.  It's possible, but the
result is very hard to understand.

Brian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Sam Hartman
> Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 1:55 PM
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: New Last Call: 'Tags for Identifying Languages' to BCP
>