[tei-council] CH and Language Tags

[Stuart A. Yeates]

On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 3:26 AM, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The more I look at the instructions for constructing language tags in
> the CH chapter, the less I like them. I do, however, like these two
> excellent guides, one higher-level and the other more practical:
>
> <http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/>
>
> <http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-choosing-language-tags>
>
> I'm inclined to replace all of our confusing and outdated info with
> something which simply says:
>
>   - BCP47 is the authoritative guide to best practice.
>
>   - IANA's language subtag registry is the authoritative list of
> recommended subtags.
>
>   - The first document above (language-tags) gives a solid overview of
> the process of constructing language tags.
>
> - The second document (qa-choosing-language-tags) gives a detailed set
> of step-by-step instructions for choosing appropriate language tags.
>
> Does anyone see any objection to this? Right now we have vague and
> misleading instructions, and although we could rewrite them, where
> better authoritative sources exist, it makes more sense, I think, to
> refer readers to them.

I completely agree with this approach.

It may be worth touching on the fact that on modern *NIX systems XML
lists of many ISO codes can be found in /usr/share/xml/iso-codes/

cheers
stuart