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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    KDE 3 language codes
From:       Frederik Fouvry <fouvry () CoLi ! Uni-SB ! DE>
Date:       2001-11-30 16:56:49
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Hi,

Browsing through the list archive I noticed the thread on the
language codes.  Here's my view: (a few can probably guess what's
coming now ;-)

I am all for sticking to the RFC (which is also a BCP - Best
Current Practice, forgot the number).  It keeps it much easier to
communicate with the outside world, among others for content
negotation, as already mentioned (the HTML standard requires the
RFC 1766 (or probably one of it's successors); XHTML does
probably too).  It is possible that the documentation will be
used outside of the KDE desktop, and having a different usage of
the language codes would just create problems.

For the documentation, the language codes are used to pick the
right XSL style sheet, and also end up in the HTML output (iirc).
I don't really see the point of changing them: a lot of work is
needed to set something up that makes things harder for everyone.
To enable browsing of GNOME and KDE documentation for instance,
we'd need the style sheets for all codes there are around.  That
could become problematic.

I don't have anything to say about the locale codes which are
technically a different issue (having some consistency helps
things along of course).

As to fallbacks (pt for pt-BR etc.): last time I checked the RFC,
the language tags were to be atomic, i.e. they cannot be split up
or "interpreted".  I think that makes sense: there may be more
things different between two languages than the country they're
spoken in.  The fallbacks should be defined by the user.  If at
installation time the first (main) language is set, the program
might propose sensible fallbacks, based on the proposed strategy,
but it should be possible to edit them afterwards.  No to
hardwired fallbacks.

Regards,

--
Frederik Fouvry		-	fouvry@coli.uni-sb.de
KDE DocBook Team	-	kde-docbook@master.kde.org

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