Re: prefer-language tag

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 13:57 98/02/19 -0500, John D. Burger wrote:
> Mark Crispin wrote:
> 
> > Here's what I think the behavior should be:
> > 1) If the user requests a "generic" form of the language, it will match either
> >    a server's "generic" form or a dialect of the server's choosing.
> > 2) If the user requests a specific dialect of the language, it will match
> >    either that dialect on the server or a generic form offered by the server,
> >    but *NOT* any other dialect.
> 
> As I understand RFC 1766, this is expressively not allowed (Section 2.1):
> 
>    There is no guaranteed relationship between languages whose tags
>    start out with the same series of subtags; especially, they are NOT
>    guraranteed [sic] to be mutually comprehensible, although this will
>    sometimes be the case.
> 
>    Applications should always treat language tags as a single token; the
>    division into main tag and subtags is an administrative mechanism,
>    not a navigation aid.
> 
> In particular, I suppose there are examples involving Chinese (e.g., ZH,
> ZH-TW, and ZH-CN) where the proposed behaviour is problematic.

Yes indeed. A much clearer examlpe are generic prefixes. x-klingon and
x-sloboddian-lower will not be mutually understandable, even though
x-sloboddian-lower and x-sloboddian-upper might be. But that is not a
problem. A user will as for "en", or "fr-ca, fr", or so, if he/she
thinks that this is okay, and zh-tw or x-sloboddian where necessary.


Regards,   Martin.