At 11:54 AM 2/6/03 -0800, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
My personal opinion? The whole debate about deprecation of language tag characters is a frivolous distraction from other technical matters of greater import, and things would be just fine with the current state of the documentation. But, if formal deprecation by the UTC is what it would take to get people to stop advocating more use of the language tags after the UTC has long determined that their use is strongly discouraged, then so be it.
My personal opinion is that labelling them as restricted for use with protocols requiring their use is sufficient and proper. In the context of such protocols, the use of tag characters is a fine mechanism. They certainly have some advantages over ASCII-style markup (e.g. <lang="...">) in many situations.
Where they don't have a place is in regular 'plain' text streams. Formal deprecation would imply to me that ANY use is discouraged, including the use with protocols that wish to make use of them. THAT seems to be going too far in this case. Where we have deprecated format characters in the past it has been precisely in situations where we wanted to discourage the use of particular 'protocols', for example for shaping and national digit selection. A./
