How about adding UN/LOCODE in zone.tab?

[Guy Harris]

On Feb 4, 2011, at 8:35 AM, Ian Abbott wrote:

> Including LOCODE in zone.tab may or may not be a good idea, but I'm
> trying hard to think why you'd want to encode a time zone in a language tag.

If by "with a language tag" he means that en-US-u-tz-usnyc" is a language tag, yes, that's bogus.

If, however, he means that "en-US-u-tz-usnyc" is a locale tag, which includes a language tag but can include more information as well, that makes sense.  Unfortunately, RFC 6067 calls it a "language tag", which is a bogus term for anything that specifies time zones, collating orders, and other information that has nothing to do with language.

The RFC says:

   %%
   Identifier: u
   Description: Unicode Locale
   Comments: Subtags for the identification of language and cultural
      variations.  Used to set behavior in locale APIs.  Data is
      located in the "common/bcp47" directory inside the referenced
      URL.  Unicode Technical Standard #35 (LDML) provides additional
      reference material defining the keys and values.
      For more details please see
      <http://cldr.unicode.org/index/bcp47-extension>.
   Added: 2010-09-02
   RFC: RFC 6067
   Authority:     Unicode Consortium
   Contact_Email: cldr-contact at unicode.org
   Mailing_List:  cldr-users at unicode.org
   URL: http://www.unicode.org/Public/cldr/latest/core.zip
   %%

I'm not sure whether the time zone counts as a "cultural variation"; it's definitely not a "language variation".

The CLDR page linked to says

	The subtags available for use in the 'u' extension provide language tag extensions that provide for additional information needed for identifying *locales*.

which suggests that, with the addition of "u-XX-YY" items, what you have really isn't a "language tag" any more, it's a "language and locale tag" (unless "locale" includes language, so that, for example, many of the locations on the planet have more than one locale, and some even *officially* have more than one locale, in which case it's a "locale tag").