From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@md.chalmers.se)
Date: Wed Nov 06 2002 - 10:32:27 EST
> I think it's time to remember the limited purpose for which Plane 14
> tagging was created: plain-text protocol messages. The idea is that
Well, not really. The Plane 0E (!) tag characters were invented solely
for "political" reasons for ONE IETF working group. But not even that
one IETF WG seems to have picked it up since. Note that for other IETF
protocols (pure plain text encoded, but since it is a protocol, the
text is parsed, dissected, and partially interpreted) language tagging
is used, but it uses "ordinary" characters, actually limited to ASCII.
See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2596.txt (for LDAP).
> when contacting an IETF-protocol server, it should be able to report
> back in various languages, using plain-text tagging to indicate which
> language you are getting (or, if it reports in multiple languages,
> which is which).
>
> This was considered to be a situation where heavyweight (XML, etc.)
> metadata was unnecessary:
>
> --> RETR 32
> <-- 522 LTAG{en}I have no clueLTAG{art-lojban}mi na jimpe
To be of any use, you (or rather a program) whould have to parse,
dissect, and partially interpret the character string (read the
language tags and picking out a substring for display). The gain
over using ordinary characters for language tags, as in XML or LDAP
is too small, and the disadvantages too big (the tag characters are
normally invisible, or (as yet) uninterpreted garbage). Yes, you
chould shoehorn language tagging into a protocol not made to have
language tagging by using the tag "characters"; but would it not
be better to redesign the protocol (either a brand new one, or a
backwards compatible one)?
I think the tag "characters" have served their political purpose,
and it is high time to deprecate them.
/Kent K
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