Languages and Character Sets Languages Philip Dorrell. Languages are always a cause of trouble when it comes to Internet protocols. Miski classifies messages first according to source, and secondly by topic. However in practice language is also a major determinant of the likely usefulness of a message to a potential reader.
Most users have one or perhaps two preferred languages for both reading and writing messages.
Large organisations may wish to post different language versions of the same message, although there may be no great need to identify which messages are effectively the same message, if potential readers generally only receive messages written in one language. RFC 1766 states that on the Internet languages should be identified by language codes specified by ISO 639. A Miski channel is identified by user and subject within the user's subject space. Since the subject has to be written in some language, and the subject description is intended to be self-contained and unambiguous, a language code should be included in the channel description. This does not have to describe the precise language variant, it should rather specify the language precisely enough for the subject description to be unambiguous.