On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
And one more
question, just to be sure: Internet standards (like
HTML/XML language tags or so) are using RFC 4646 codes, not ISO 639?
Yes. HTML 4.01 references RFC 1766 (the 1995 version) and XML 1.0
references RFC 3066 (the 2001 version). A W3C article on the subject [1]
states that the most recent RFC in the BCP 47 series is the preferred
standard for XML and HTML documents, currently RFC 4646.
[1] <http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/>
Then, I see no reason why to stay with ISO 639 codes. RFC 4646 codes
are more flexible (=better) and Internet standards are based on those
codes.
The only issue which I see is: Do we have some problems with language
codes which mean one language in ISO 639 and a different one in RFC
4646?