Re: Proposal: Locale Preferences API

Hi Richard, 

On Monday, July 29, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Richard Ishida wrote:

> Hi Marcos,
> 
> It seems a reasonable suggestion to allow scripts to access the 
> prioritised list of browser/system language preferences, and to know 
> when they are changed.
> 
> I guess my concern is more for the wording of the proposal, which seems 
> to suggest that this is a solution for locale management, whereas the 
> information sent in the Accept-Language header is really just about 
> preferred language.

Yeah, your (and everyone who responded) is totally right - my bad on screwing up the terminology :(   
> It's true that often that language preferences are used as part of the 
> process of inferring the locale (which typically needs region-based or 
> other information over and above language), and that sometimes language 
> tags can contain useful locale-related information, but the info sent in 
> Accept-Language headers doesn't always represent "the end-user's 
> preferred languages and regional settings" - often it's just the 
> preferred languages. (See 
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-accept-lang-locales for 
> more discussion around that).

Thanks for the pointer. I think Addison said to me previously that I shouldn't look at some of those documents any more as they are a bit stale. That one is still ok, right? 
 
> 
> That said, it seems like many of the use cases that lead to this 
> proposal are actually related to managing the *language* in which the 
> user is interacting with a page or app, and I think that the proposal 
> certainly makes sense for that.

Exactly.  
> So, I would suggest that you tighten the wording of the proposal, eg.
> 
> "The idea is to expose to script the language tags that represents the 
> user's locale preferences (akin to the language tags that are normally 
> sent with HTTP's `Accept-Languages` header)."
> =>
> "The idea is to expose to script the language tags that are normally 
> sent by the browser with HTTP's Accept-Language header, which can be 
> used in determining the language of the user interface/page, and in some 
> cases for an attempt at locale identification."
> 

Integrated the text above. I've not updated the rest of the document yet - as I'm about to run off on vacation! But really appreciate your help and review :)

Kind regards,
Marcos

Received on Wednesday, 31 July 2013 18:35:25 UTC