Re: locales

What I am trying to get out of this discussion is to be able to identify a 
user's locale, especially for an anonymous user without personalization, 
and the user's language. The coupling of language_region is useless for a 
global web application, I even doubt it makes much sense on a local 
operating system. Travelling globally with a notebook pc I might want to 
maintain my UI language, but change the locale depending on where I am.

There is a fine line between a user's locale and a user's personalization. 
I am trying to identify the bare minimum locale without personalization, 
and language is a personal preference to me. Being bilingual I would like 
to be able to set my computer to de_US or en_DE sometimes .... 

I have created the Yahoo.Groups forum for locale discussions - please feel 
free to join, everybody: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/locales


David Possin





"Mark Davis" <mark@macchiato.com>
Sent by: www-international-request@w3.org
11/08/01 10:59 AM

 
        To:     "Suzanne M. Topping" <stopping@bizwonk.com>, <www-international@w3.org>, 
"Nelocsig \(E-mail\)" <nelocsig@yahoogroups.com>
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: locales


I have some doubts as to this project along these lines. Currency and
Timezone are certainly orthogonal to what is currently thought of as a
locale. This does not mean that they are unimportant (in ICU we have 
always
had timezone support, and looking at the currency issue for our next 
release
(see http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/ > Docs & Papers > design >
currency.html), but I have doubts as to one wants to call them part of a
"locale".

What some people appear to want is some structured way to indicate and/or
communicate a raft of information about a client's preferences ("client" 
in
a broad sense -- maybe "user" would be a better term). That would 
presumably
include the traditional features of a locale, such as how dates are
formatted, but may also -- *depending on the application* -- include
currency, timezone, preferred character set, smoker/non-smoker, vegetarian
or not, music preference, religion, party affiliation, favorite charity,
etc.

Some of these can be bundled up with a textual shorthand, such as USD for 
US
dollar, or "en-US" for date/time/number/sorting conventions. Many people,
however, customize their settings -- I don't use the standard US dates on 
my
machines, I use the ISO 2001-12-31 style -- so the standard locales don't
and cannot convey that information.

Rather than some ad-hoc extension to "en-US-CAD-PTZ" to try to capture 
only
some clumsy fraction of this, what it really sounds like is desired is an
XML format for interchange "user preferences". With that, one could 
capture
things such as the fact that my normal date/time/number formats are en-US,
but that I want "YYYY-MM-DD" for dates. I suspect a good deal of this is
going on already in the many groups looking at XML interchange of business
data.

Mark

—————

Ὀλίγοι ἔμφονες πολλῶν ἀφρόνων φοβερώτεροι — Πλάτωνος
[For transliteration, see http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/tr]

http://www.macchiato.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Suzanne M. Topping" <stopping@bizwonk.com>
To: <www-international@w3.org>; "Nelocsig (E-mail)"
<nelocsig@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 07:23
Subject: RE: valid locales ---> was Re: bilingual websites


> Questions about this topic came up recently on another list, and caused
> me to wonder if it might be "better" to offer user selectable options
> for various locale-related functions, rather than trying to devise what
> individual preferences or requirements might be?
>
> For example, UIs could default to the language used by the operating
> system, and could start with "default" formatting etc. settings based on
> the OS as well. But perhaps for optimal user satisfaction, we should
> offer dropdowns next to date, time, currency, address, title etc. fields
> which would allow users to choose how they wanted data displayed, and
> have the formats changed on the fly.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter_Constable@sil.org [mailto:Peter_Constable@sil.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 9:16 AM
> To: www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Re: valid locales ---> was Re: bilingual websites
>
>
>
> On 10/31/2001 12:47:09 PM David_Possin@i2.com wrote:
>
> >So far we have ISO codes for language (I prefer language group) and for
> country
> >(I prefer region). But there is not standard definition that tells me
> which
> >combinations are valid. Therefore I assume that any combination is
> valid and
> >legal and can be used. WRONG!
>
> [snip]
>
> >Let me describe 2 simple workflows our customers require. A major
> online
> >bookseller wants to display the site in the user's language and the
> user's
> >currency... The bookseller wants to
> >offer Spanish titles with Mexican preferences in US dollars.
>
>
>