I'm thinking it may actually be worth hashing out some of this - this whole thing is starting to remind me of the X11 font picker, but I don't know enough about BCP47...
Ah. I begin to see some of the difficulties inherent when I skimmed past this part of BCP47...
The choice of subtags used to form a language tag SHOULD follow these
guidelines:
1. Use as precise a tag as possible, but no more specific than is
justified. Avoid using subtags that are not important for
distinguishing content in an application.
* For example, 'de' might suffice for tagging an email written
in German, while "de-CH-1996" is probably unnecessarily
precise for such a task.
* Note that some subtag sequences might not represent the
language a casual user might expect. For example, the Swiss
German (Schweizerdeutsch) language is represented by "gsw-CH"
and not by "de-CH". This latter tag represents German ('de')
as used in Switzerland ('CH'), also known as Swiss High German
(Schweizer Hochdeutsch). Both are real languages, and
distinguishing between them could be important to an
application.
... So, yes, we do want to support the flexibility, but on the other hand, that means that people may do the wrong thing.
I begin to suspect that the right UI thing to do is definitely to have the full list available somehow as some kind of complicated picker on the user's profile page, including help text and/or FAQ link to common language choices, and then just allow people to choose from their own profile's shortlist as they post/comment (if they wish to).
I guess the majority of people will pick a top level language or three, and feel no need to delve into sub tags at all, so the picker should be built to support and encourage that behaviour.
People who want a region will probably be looking for it already.
Searching shouldn't be too hard - if you're searching for stuff in "en", "cmn", or "qya", then you should get all the sub tags, and if you're wanting specific sub tags then you can search for those.
I'm not entirely sure how the existing tag back end works for searching, but I imagine the BCP47 tags/sub tags could be integrated into that back end or a similar thing.
Some Implementation mumbling
Ah. I begin to see some of the difficulties inherent when I skimmed past this part of BCP47...
The choice of subtags used to form a language tag SHOULD follow these guidelines: 1. Use as precise a tag as possible, but no more specific than is justified. Avoid using subtags that are not important for distinguishing content in an application. * For example, 'de' might suffice for tagging an email written in German, while "de-CH-1996" is probably unnecessarily precise for such a task. * Note that some subtag sequences might not represent the language a casual user might expect. For example, the Swiss German (Schweizerdeutsch) language is represented by "gsw-CH" and not by "de-CH". This latter tag represents German ('de') as used in Switzerland ('CH'), also known as Swiss High German (Schweizer Hochdeutsch). Both are real languages, and distinguishing between them could be important to an application.... So, yes, we do want to support the flexibility, but on the other hand, that means that people may do the wrong thing.
I begin to suspect that the right UI thing to do is definitely to have the full list available somehow as some kind of complicated picker on the user's profile page, including help text and/or FAQ link to common language choices, and then just allow people to choose from their own profile's shortlist as they post/comment (if they wish to).
I guess the majority of people will pick a top level language or three, and feel no need to delve into sub tags at all, so the picker should be built to support and encourage that behaviour.
People who want a region will probably be looking for it already.
Searching shouldn't be too hard - if you're searching for stuff in "en", "cmn", or "qya", then you should get all the sub tags, and if you're wanting specific sub tags then you can search for those.
I'm not entirely sure how the existing tag back end works for searching, but I imagine the BCP47 tags/sub tags could be integrated into that back end or a similar thing.