On 23/09/05, Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/23/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Actually, Andrew was closer: it's en-gb, because RFC 3066 defines it as an ISO 639 language code (en for English) plus an ISO 3166 country code (GB meaning, confusingly, the UK; I'm glad the IANA ignored this and gave us .uk for our domains)
To be somewhat more pedantic, it should be "en-GB", since IIRC the second ISO code is supposed to be written in uppercase. This is actually the system used for localization of Firefox in foreign languages (e.g. fr-CA and fr-FR for the French of Canada and France, respectively).
Funnily enough, in my skim-reading of the RFC earlier I spotted this part:
All tags are to be treated as case insensitive; there exist conventions for capitalization of some of them, but these should not be taken to carry meaning. For instance, [ISO 3166] recommends that country codes are capitalized (MN Mongolia), while [ISO 639] recommends that language codes are written in lower case (mn Mongolian). [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt, section 2.1]
So, yes and no; if you needed to canonicalise a set of them, it might make sense to do it to "aa-AA" format, but neither "AA-AA", "aa-aa", nor any other combination should actually be considered incorrect. [Or that's how I'd read it, anyway]
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]