Re: A spec for showing language in MIME headers

[Masataka Ohta <mohta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >> I would probably agree about "XX" or "IAN".  But ISO/TC46 tends to like

> >Anyway, as 26*26*26+26*26=18252, the 2 or 3 letter space is not large
> >enough to give meaningful names to all the languages in the world.

> Which is why the latest proposal doesn't have such limitations.  If ISO-639
> version 2539 has 100 letter codes, then Content-Language will be able to
> handle it.

Here, we have, quite pedantically, been talking about the future
possibility of having a 639 reigstered language "IANA", which destroys
Harald's scheme.

> I suspect that long before all people of the world have access to e-mail
> communications, and want to use their own languages, that we'll all be
> speaking some Japano-English dialect anyway, and we'll only need one
> language code. :-)

Say that to French. (^.^)

> As for time-stamping: I think that is going a little overboard.  We are
> talking about e-mail communications, with messages that have a fairly short
> life-time.

Aren't we talking about a long term archive which contains data in MIME
format?

> Even if
> messages are stored in archives (as most of USENET is), then the Date: header
> on the messages is sufficient to say "country code xy as it was in 1993"
> if that kind of information is important.

If each compoents of a multipart message have separate Date: header, yes.

Anyway, country code is not so useful to distinguish languages though
there is notable exceptions of AU/GB/US English.

> There is a need to cope with ancient languages and linguistic notations, but
> except for some twisted individuals who delight in "breaking the system",
> e-mail, in the form of text/*, is not the best way to do this.  Rather some
> kind of marked-up document format would be better,

Isn't MIME rich text marked-up document?

> especially since it is
> likely that explanatory text in a current language would be wrapped around
> the ancient writings or linguistic notations.  This is beyond the scope of
> the IETF.

It seems to me that John C. Klensin is thinking about that possibility
by tagging even individual words with langage names.

						Masataka Ohta