L2/02-399 Date/Time: Sun Nov 3 10:08:23 EST 2002 Contact: WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk Representation on the Proposal to Deprecate the Plane 14 Language Tags, writing against the motion. William Overington 3 November 2002 It seems to me that deprecating these language tags would be a bad thing as the language tags could well have potential use in plain text files on the DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform) platform in order to signal to a Java program accessing a plain text file the language in which any particular text is written. I therefore ask members of the Unicode Technical Committee please to vote against the motion to deprecate the plane 14 language tags. The DVB-MHP platform is a platform. Java programs are broadcast in a unidirectional, cyclic manner so as to produce effectively a "disc in the sky". This uses my telesoftware invention. The word telesoftware, and its etymology, are in the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, volume 17. The telesoftware concept was also featured in the USA in the first issue of the magazine Personal Computing, published back in the 1970s. The effect of the telesoftware concept is to produce the effect of a remote access computer system without the use of a telephone line or any return link to the central broadcasting computer. There are limitations to the level of interactivity: one cannot, for example, order an airline ticket using telesoftware. However, the DVB-MHP system does have an option for a telephone based link to merchants and so on. Much is made of that telephone link possibility, sometimes to the lack of explaining the high computational power of the system when not using a telephone link. For example, the possibility for educational broadcasts across whole continents without the use of any telephone connections, thereby potentially having the possibility of schools in rural areas having computers in DVB-MHP television sets with good educational software support. DVB-MHP broadcasts have recently begun in Germany, there is information on the http://www.mhp-forum.de website. That information is in German, though there are a number of good illustrations not found elsewhere. Information on the DVB-MHP system is available at the http://www.mhp.org website, in English. That website is administered from a secretariat which is housed at the offices of The European Broadcasting Union in Geneva. There is also the discussion forum at the http://forum.mhp.org website. The Java programs which run on the DVB-MHP platform are authored by content authors. An analogy is with the way that films broadcast on television channels are not always made by the television companies themselves. The Java programs may be self-contained or may use support files. The format of those support files is up to the author of each Java program, though some formats such as png (Portable Network Graphics) have special standing. Plain text files is one of the choices which a content author may choose to use. A content author could also use a fancy text format if he or she so chooses. I am not suggesting that all the files used by the Java programs which are broadcast as telesoftware programs will be plain text, only that plain text files could be used. Nevertheless, the DVB-MHP system is not the web and it is not office computing where there is often a fairly substantial investment in packages which use fancy text files. The DVB-MHP system is likely to evolve so as to have its own way of doing things. One interesting issue, for example, is as to whether content authorship will be done mainly in-house by broadcasters or by large media authoring companies or will there be a strong contribution from smaller independent content authoring companies. Another interesting matter is as to whether there will be any access route for individuals interested in content authorship, perhaps by sending in submissions to a publishing company in a similar manner to the way that a writer can send in articles to a magazine editor. Content authorship infrastructure for the DVB-MHP platform is at a relatively early stage. As the DVB-MHP system uses Java, and Java uses Unicode, then the DVB-MHP system uses Unicode, and what is contained in Unicode is thus of interest to content authors who would like to author content for the DVB-MHP platform. The DVB-MHP system is up and running on a regular basis in Finland and Germany. There is worldwide interest in the DVB-MHP system. Much of the commercial driving force for the DVB-MHP systems is based around such aspects as electronic program guides for televisions, home shopping, quiz shows and the like. However, the system is a Java based system which can also be used for high quality educational multimedia broadcasts. An analogy is the way that most television sets are installed for entertainment purposes, yet educational programmes can be sent using the same transmission system, and received using the same reception equipment, as is used for entertainment programmes. Certainly, from my own perspective, I feel that plain text files may be very important for information content upon the DVB-MHP channel, particularly in an educational context. There may well be areas of the world where the broadcasting footprint of a direct broadcast satellite will cover areas occupied by peoples of many different languages and a method of a computer system in a television set being able easily to select out plain text files in a particular language from a collection of available files could be very useful. At the present time I have no plans to use the Unicode language tags myself, as indeed I am not at the centre of content authorship, having more of an infrastructure designing interest, such as this present activity of making a representation that plane 14 language tags should not be deprecated, in order that they will be available for use if the future of content development goes that way. As to whether content development will go towards using plane 14 language tags or will never use them, I do not know and I do not have sufficient information with which to speculate upon the matter. I write simply to express the view that it does seem a pity that just as DVB-MHP, which uses Unicode, is starting to be run in more than one country that an existing method of encoding information about languages is possibly to be formally deprecated when there is no clear indication one way or the other as to whether, as the DVB-MHP system spreads around the world, plane 14 language tags will find the interest of content authors. It may be that they will not be used, yet I feel that it is far better to leave them available with the possibility they not be used rather than to deprecate them and in a few years time it be found that they could have been used to advantage. Thus I ask that you please vote against the motion to deprecate the plane 14 language tags.