[Foundation-l] Community draft of language proposal policy

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at 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?