Re: [idn] Internationalized PTR draft submitted

[Harald Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

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