From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2006 - 09:17:11 CDT
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
> 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.
I won't repeat Andrew in depth, but will only ask where you got this
"information." It certainly can't be found in the ISO 639 code lists,
which show "Chinese" for zh and "Sichuan Yi" for ii.
> 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).
The domain name in his examples was "example.com". Anything beyond that
is up to him. And unless he's already rolled out his site/s, he can
change it/them however he likes with no compatibility problems.
> 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).
Explicit language names <http://www.example.com/english> would of course
work, but you are left with the question of what language the language
names should be in! And as soon as you get to
<http://www.example.com/français> and <http://www.example.com/español>
you are faced with the question of spelling the language names "wrong,"
or spelling them right and crossing your fingers for IDN support. I
think you'll find that most site designers in Michael's situation choose
short codes.
-- Doug Ewell Fullerton, California, USA http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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