You can reiterate it all you want; in practice, 3066 tags are used as locale identifiers. And for a narrow sense of locales, that is perfectly reasonable. For a broad sense of "locale", including timezone, user's currency, religious preference, etc., it clearly would not be reasonable, and I would agree with you for that.
>ISO 639 is not unstable. It is an open code set that is being added to over time, but I don't think that should be referred to as unstable -- that term suggests other things. ISO 3066 has *demonstrated* instability, because they remove codes, then reuse those codes for different entities. It'd be like our removing a character, then later putting a different character in that spot*. ISO 639 has not yet *demonstrated* instability. They have removed codes, but since they haven't reused them, one can handle that with an alias table, keeping all the old codes usable. However, there is no policy documented *anywhere* that says they won't. As long as they don't have that, and given the demonstrated instability in ISO 3066, the standard simply cannot be trusted to be stable in the future. * Yes, I know we did that for Korean, when we were first getting started. But we learned from that, and put into place firm policies against that ever happening in the future. We have no such assurances from ISO, for some pretty key components: language codes, country codes, currency codes, or script codes. Mark __________________________________ http://www.macchiato.com â ààààààààààààààààààààà â ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Constable" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Mark Davis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Philippe Verdy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Fri, 2004 Apr 23 16:18 Subject: RE: Common Locale Data Repository Project > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of Mark Davis > You are talking about Locale IDs. There is currently work underway on an RFC to > replace 3066 But let me reiterate from my correction to Philippe: even the replacement of RFC 3066 is a specification for *language* identification, not *locale* identification. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
