John Hudson <tiro at tiro dot com> wrote: > In the code lists at http://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html the 4-letter > script codes are shown capitalised, e.g. Arab not arab, Armn not armn, etc.. Is this > intentional? Should the codes always be capitalised? Does it matter if they are not?
The FDIS from February 2003 states that "The four-letter codes SHALL be written with an initial capital Latin letter and final small Latin letters" (emphasis mine). Although this is a useful convention and aids readability, I would suggest -- without any authority -- that it is only a convention and not an absolute requirement for use of the codes, just as the analogous conventions to express ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes in all-lowercase and all-uppercase, respectively, are just conventions. In particular, both RFC 3066 and its (in-progress) successor state that language tags and subtags "are to be treated as case insensitive." And, with apologies for bringing up a sore point for many, Unicode recommends converting all language tags, including subtags, to lowercase before encoding them as Plane 14 language tag characters (TUS 4.0, section 15.10, page 405). ISO 15924 alpha-4 codes are already distinguishable from ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes, simply by virtue of being four letters long. Michael, please let me know if I am off base on this. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
