Re: are Unicode codes somehow specified in official national linguistic literature ? (worldwide)

From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@icu-project.org)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2006 - 20:47:16 CDT

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    Actually, the cases discussed do involve fallback from one family to
    another, such as from (a particular kind of) Sami to Norwegian, or Breton to
    French. We had quite a number of discussions about this, and finally
    concluded that we should not build the fallback in at a low level, since the
    particular fallback may very well be an individual preference, but that the
    best we should do would be to have a structure that suggested a default
    fallback for the locale, which could be overridden according to the user
    preference.

    Mark

    On 6/14/06, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
    >
    > I already submitted some remarks there, but it's been a long time, and
    > the CLDR has evolved (as well as the ICU library) and my initial comments
    > may look outdated regarding the new developments.
    >
    > But this bug repport is not really discussing the fallback mechanism from
    > one language to a language family, but from a variant to a language, or the
    > fallback for languages that have multiple codes or legacy codes (he/iw,
    > in/id) as seen in Java VMs where the legacy codes (like iw, in) are still
    > the only one working given that it preserves the compatibility of old
    > applicaitons that depended on them for finding their resources with the
    > standard class loader of Java 1.3/1.4 (and even 5.0).
    >
    > I still hope that the successor of RFC 3066 will come soon to describe
    > correctly the new locale identifiers (and especially the new ISO 15924 field
    > for the indication of scripts).
    >
    > But gien that ISO 639-3 is still not finalized, it will be hard to find a
    > definitive solution for designating locales and all their known aliases, and
    > still preserve the compatibility of legacy applications depending on these
    > identifiers.
    >
    > ICU for now proposes a temporary solution for resolving the resource
    > fallback path, but it certainly requires more thoughts to handle all
    > possible cases (and the interaction of language identifiers with ISO 3166
    > country/region identifiers, or the new aliases introduced now by deprecating
    > the ISO 3166 country/region identifiers in favor of more precise ISO 639-3
    > language identifiers);
    >
    > The current locale fallback mechanism implemented in legacy applications
    > is most often fixed and various systems use different fallback algorithms to
    > determine alternate locales. In Java for example, this mechanism also
    > interacts not only with the user settings, but also with the local system
    > settings, when no user locale matches with a given resource id. But there's
    > still no way in Java to go after the first field of the locale id, as its
    > parent is a single root, and not another locale.
    >
    > Even the java Locale class still does not include a constructor to specify
    > the script identifier (one could specify it in the variant identifier, but
    > its place at the third position after the country identifier is not the best
    > one for correct locale resolution, as this should be on the second
    > place between the language code and the region code). If one uses the field
    > normally reserved for the country to set the script code, it won't interact
    > cleanly with legacy applications that use country codes.
    >
    > So one must use its own class cloader, using its own fallback mechanism,
    > and create a new class to extend the Locale object, and implement variuous
    > tricks to make it work with the standard locale interface. This is more or
    > less what ICU does to support extended locale identifiers and aliases.
    >
    > ----- Original Message -----
    > *From:* Mark Davis <mark.davis@icu-project.org>
    > *To:* Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
    > *Cc:* Erkki Kolehmainen <erkki.kolehmainen@kotus.fi> ; Cristian Secară<orice@secarica.ro>;
    > unicode@unicode.org
    > *Sent:* Wednesday, June 14, 2006 9:08 PM
    > *Subject:* Re: are Unicode codes somehow specified in official national
    > linguistic literature ? (worldwide)
    >
    > There is a planned mechanism: see
    > http://dev.icu-project.org/cgi-bin/locale-bugs?findid=698
    >
    > (This was planned for 1.4, but delayed since we didn't have enough data to
    > warrent adding the mechanism.)
    >
    >



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