Re: DOCBOOK: Language codes with countries

[Tony Graham <Tony dot Graham at ireland dot sun dot com>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote at 18 Jul 2001 09:03:08 -0400:
 > p. 120 of the Docbook book gives en_US as an example of an ISO 3166 country code for the lang attribute. However, these are normally written using hyphens rather than underscores; e.g. en-US. Which is correct for Docbook?

"en_US" or "en-US" is really a question of style.  "en_US" is POSIX
locale style, and "en-US" is RFC 1766 style.  Since, AFAIK, TDG
doesn't mention RFC 1766 or xml:lang (which follows RFC 1766 style and
which, by this time, many people are familiar with), there's nothing
to say that "en_US" is wrong.

RFC 1766 was published in March 1995.  I don't remember when the lang
attribute was added to DocBook, but I expect that it was long before
1995.  That, plus DocBook's origins as software documentation and the
existence of the "en_US" example in the definitive guide, seems in
indicate that "en_US" is more right than it is wrong.

OTOH, DocBook in XML that uses xml:lang instead of lang should use RFC 
1766 style in the xml:lang attributes.

Regards,


Tony Graham
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Graham                           mailto:tony.graham@ireland.sun.com
Sun Microsystems Ireland Ltd                       Phone: +353 1 8199708
Hamilton House, East Point Business Park, Dublin 3            x(70)19708


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