> On 4 Sep 2009, at 03:54, Craig Andrews wrote: > >> 1. What languages should we offer? I'm thinking of storing a 2 letter >> ISO-639-1 code with each notice (or NULL, if we don't know). This >> means >> there is no difference between "English (UK)" and "English (US)" >> which I >> think is the right way to go. Anyone disagree? > > I think it would be nice to accept arbitrary BCP 47 (RFC 4646 & RFC > 4647) language tags - to do so would, after all, be "best current > practice". Because there are (for all intents and purposes) an > infinite number of language tags allowed by BCP 47, there is probably > no decent UI to allow people to choose such a tag. So it might be > that the user interface would only use 2 letter codes, but the API > could allow longer codes. > > One consideration is that ISO-639-1 doesn't cover all languages. > ISO-639-2 three letter codes offer better coverage. A lot of the > languages not covered by 639-1 are pretty obscure, and we wouldn't > lose much by not supporting them: ancient languages like Hittite, > Aramaic and Gothic; tribal languages like Cherokee and those spoken > in Papua New Guinea; and constructed languages like Blissymbolics and > Klingon. There are a few useful ones in there though - Filipino, for > instance, which has about 90 million speakers, roughly 25 million as > a first language.
Languages are so complicated... ugh. I'm not sure what interface to use for users to select what languages they understand. Right now, I just a bunch of check boxes, but that won't scale to the number of languages that you mention. And I do think it's important to support pretty much all of these languages. > >> 6. I'm adding a new database table with this schema: >> create table user_language ( >> user_id integer not null comment 'user understanding the language' >> references user (id), >> language char(2) not null comment 'language understood' >> constraint primary key (user_id, language) >> ); > > This could possibly be exposed in the user's FOAF file: > > http://danbri.org/words/2008/03/10/289 Excellent idea - I completely agree! As I just indicated in my message a few moments ago, I have a branch on gitorious... perhaps this could be your first contribution to it :-) OMB also needs to be extended to convey linguistic information. > > -- > Toby A Inkster > <mailto:[email protected]> > <http://tobyinkster.co.uk> > > > > _______________________________________________ Laconica-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
