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At 15:09 +0000 2001-03-06, John Clews wrote: >(b) in some programming languages and applications, the use of _only_ > 2-letter codes for languages seems to have been built into the > system design, and overcoming this limitation, and coping with > backwards compatibility, is NOT a trivial task. I DO NOT ACCEPT THIS. "Some" programming languages? "Seems" to have been built into the system design? This is not, John, adequate to counter a single one of my arguments which are based on a huge reality. Note please that Google.com searches 1,346,966,000 web pages. Whether you call that 1.3 billion or 1.3 thousand million web oages, it is still far, far, far, far, far, far, far more real than the statements the TC37 representatives have been making. >These are not simply "pie-in-the-sky theoretical considerations" as >Michael Everson suggests, later in his email. Facts would be nice, John. >I think that RFC 3066 _WILL_ have to be rewritten to reflect this >exact point. Not doing so will make for all sorts of confusions. >It can be done in a way which will keep work to a minimum. No, it will have to be rewritten because you lot are going back on your word. And for no demonstrable reason that I can see. >It will take very little rewriting of RFC 3066 to make it work: >instead of refering to ISO 639-1 for 2-letter codes, refer simply to: It takes up to a year of discussion and approval, and in the meantime we have RFC 3066 which you seem happy enough to dismantle, but which is guiding people already. And so you'll (the figurative collective who wants to break the agreement made) just make us rewrite it because you don't really care whether people can rely on the stability of standards and of the resolutions standardizers make in order to handle real-world problems. >As I recall, freezing 2-letter codes in Internet use at this point >(ISO 639:1988) was Michael Everson's _original_ proposal, prior to >his later proposal of freezing ISO 639-1 2001 (not yet published): >the Internet community should not tie itself to yet unpublished >standards, a position which RFC 3066 currently gets quite near, >as it stands now. The agreement was to choose to freeze it after the publication, in order to allow all of you to add whatever you thought was needful now. You have yet to show cause why you cannot bite the bullet and keep your agreement for the greater good. It is for the greater good that the agreement was made. The ideas you gave for "fixing" this situation simply put the burden of a whole bunch of other people, including myself, to fix something which, if the 639-1'ers will just keep their word, doesn't need fixing. Unhappily, Michael Everson Language-Tag Reviewer, RFC 3066