From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2006 - 06:34:33 CDT
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> Which is fine, but Peter's point was that you should use "zh-Hans" (or
> "zh_Hans" if necessary) rather than "zh-CN" or "zh_CN". The combination
> "zh-CN" literally means "Chinese as spoken in mainland China," but in
> fact that is not a useful distinction: are we talking about Mandarin,
> Cantonese, Wu, or what? All are spoken in the PRC. If what you really
> want to convey is "Simplified Chinese, not Traditional" then use
> "zh-Hans" instead. Again, know what problem you are solving.
There are dstinct language codes now for Wu, Cantonese, Yi, ... Why continuing to use "zh" for them?
"zh" should only be used for spoken Mandarin, independantly of the fact it is written with Traditional or Simplified Han characters.
Oh, i orgot to day that I DON'T disagree with your arguments regarding the mix of language and country codes. But I would not recommand changing them when the developer has already assigned them for use in a domain name (where those places have NO designated standard and can be whatever string that was chosen by the website author; changing domain names or URLs is always a bad thing, when there are no compelling reason that this breaks some software compatibility or indexing by search engines; but even in this case, adding aliases and keeping the old URLs functional is the best option).
Regarding the use of language codes or country codes in domain names or URL paths, i tend to think that either solution is bad, and that explicit complete language fames are preferable. i supported only the country codes for domains using ccTLD extensions, because it's all that is available (there's no TLD for now working with language codes, and even if it existed, it would conflict now with existing country codes and ccTLDs).
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