Re: [whatwg] Should navigator.language and and/or HTTP Accept-Language include locale?

From: whatwg [mailto:whatwg-bounces@lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of Geoffrey Garen

> Should navigator.language and/or HTTP Accept-Language include my locale in
> addition to my language — even if the combination is exotic?

It seems like there was a good discussion on this thread but not much in the way of conclusion.

My take on this is that ECMA-402's DefaultLocale() is locale, whereas navigator.language/HTTP Accept-Language is language, and they should stay separate. navigator.language should continue reflecting language settings.

However, I think there's definite interest in reflecting locale settings as well. I don't think that this is best captured by a simple language tag string. Instead, as discussed in https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/171 briefly, I think you want a structured object (`navigator.locales` is the proposal) that contains all the different extensions and thus allows you to figure out different settings like time formatting, date formatting, etc.

For example, as with many geeks, I set my OS to 24-hour time and YYYY-MM-DD date format. But my language is still en-US, and we shouldn't try to find some language tag that reflects my settings and call it the "locale". We should just reflect the settings directly.

I last talked about this in some detail with Dan Ehrenberg of the V8 team and Caridy Patiño, one of the editors of ECMA-402. We were roughly aligned on the direction but I can't find any record of our conversations, and it looks like there hasn't been much spec movement either. If this is something Apple is interested in, I can work with Caridy on a more complete spec proposal for `navigator.locales` and how it interacts with 402.

What do you think?

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2016 20:00:45 UTC