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Bug 14021 - Define "represent the same language". Do these language tags represent same languages? en vs EN, zh-min-nan vs nan, zh-TW vs zh-Hant-TW
Summary: Define "represent the same language". Do these language tags represent same ...
Status: RESOLVED NEEDSINFO
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-09-04 04:38 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-10-25 03:26 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-09-04 04:38:56 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#attr-track-label
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#attr-track-label

Comment:
Define "represent the same language".  Do these language tags represent same
languages? en vs EN, zh-min-nan vs nan, zh-TW vs zh-Hant-TW 

Posted from: 113.197.157.202
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1
Comment 1 Leif Halvard Silli 2011-09-04 10:58:27 UTC 
(In reply to comment #0)

> Do these language tags represent same
> languages? en vs EN, zh-min-nan vs nan, zh-TW vs zh-Hant-TW 

According to the spec, the @srclang value "must be a valid BCP 47 language tag". 

See bug 13393 (which states that, for a Polyglot document, the following should be conforming - despite Polyglot Markup's preoccupation with equal DOM:

    <foo lang="en-us" xml:lang="EN-US" >color</foo>

Formally, since the spec points to BCP 47, it should already be clear. But if it is necessary to underline that srclang='en-US' and srclang='EN-US'  (and other casing variants) are equal (as they are), then the spec should underline the same issue for the @lang and xml:@lang attributes too.
Comment 2 Leif Halvard Silli 2011-09-04 11:35:36 UTC 
(In reply to comment #0)

> zh-min-nan vs nan, zh-TW vs zh-Hant-TW 

This, of course, is a different problem, and more difficult (for me) to  answer.  But as a video could very well have both an 'en-CA' track and a 'en-GB' and a 'en' track, they would all be seen as different.
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-19 23:52:12 UTC 
Does BCP47 not adequately define whether two languages are the same?
Comment 4 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-25 03:26:53 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Did Not Understand Request
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: see comment 3