CFV: Project sponsorship: Java Locale Enhancement

[Naoto Sato]

Regarding the CFV on the following question[1]:

Question: Should the Internationalization/Localization Group sponsor the
"Java Locale Enhancement Project"?

Voting has now concluded.  I have received "Yes" votes from the
following 4 members of the Internationalization/Localization Group:

     Michael Fang
     Steven Loomis
     Masayoshi Okutsu
     Naoto Sato

This constitutes an absolute majority of the eligible voting members.
Thus I am able to immediately render a decision.

The Internationalization/Localization Group has decided to sponsor the 
Java Locale Enhancement Project.

Thank you.
Naoto Sato

[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/i18n-dev/2008-October/000062.html

Doug Felt wrote:
> I hereby propose an openjdk project "Java Locale Enhancement".
> 
> This proposal [1] enhances java.util.Locale in order to bring Java into
> conformance with IETF BCP47 [2] and UTR35(CLDR/LDML) [3].
> 
> The internal structure for Locale was modeled after IETF RFC 1766 [4], which
> in 1995 was the industry standard for the representation of languages and
> locales (and required by HTML, XML, and many other specifications and
> programs).
> 
> RFC 1766 has been superseded by IETF BCP 47, which makes a number of
> additions needed for the representation of languages. Script codes [5]
> support required distinctions among languages that use different writing
> systems (such as simplified vs traditional Chinese), with an optimal
> hierarchical representation of locale data. 3-letter base language codes
> (ISO 639 Part 2 ＆ 3 [6, 7]) represent such languages as Filipino (fil) the
> official language of the Philipines. BCP 47 also allows for regional
> variants, like Latin American Spanish (es_419), using region identifiers
> listed in the IANA subtag registry [8].
> 
> Locale's limitations are already causing significant practical problems. For
> example, when a J2EE Servlet container implementation parses a language tag
> from Accept Language and creates a Locale instance, it cannot map a script
> code into the new Locale object without breaking its original structure,
> because the use of script code and 3-letter language codes is not allowed by
> the current Java Locale specification.
> 
> I propose this project be sponsored by the OpenJDK Internationalization
> group. I volunteer to be moderator of the project.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Doug Felt
> 
> [1] http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=d3q3z35_14c2hhxmdw
> [2] http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/bcp/bcp47.txt
> [3] http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/
> [4] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1766.txt
> [5] http://unicode.org/iso15924/
> [6] http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
> [7] http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/default.asp
> [8] http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry


-- 
Naoto Sato