- From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 05:05:20 +0100
- To: "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Cc: Cameron Jones <cmhjones@gmail.com>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>
* Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: >People using their own computer likely have it set up with the correct >locale (definitely not always true, but I think true enough that we >can consider most people in this category). So they don't need any >help from us; localized inputs will already be displaying "correctly" >for them. > >This applies whether I'm visiting pages in my locale or not. As an >en-US speaker, I expect to see dates in the US format, and would find >a German-locale date input confusing to work with, even on a German >site. (I've had occasion to buy train tickets on a French-only site, >for example, which is confusing enough without dates looking wrong to >me.) So when I'm working on my own computers, letting the page set >the locale of its inputs is actually harmful to me. > >The only case where help is needed is if someone doesn't control the >locale of the computer they're using, [...] That is not a valid conclusion. A typical setup around here is a german operating system with an en-us web browser which in my case is set to prefer generic "en" in the Accept-Language header in the hope to avoid machine translations into german. I do not know what the browser might think my preferred locale is for automatic localisation when visiting en-gb or alternatively en-us sites, and I am sure it would be extremely confusing if any automatic localisation is not immediately obvious and understandable. "Mittwoch, 14. Januar 2015, 04:55 Uhr Berliner Zeit" might be fine (if I unreasonably assume a site has no bugs with respect to timezones and such), but for dates like "2015-12-01" or numbers like "123,456" without additional context, I would have no idea what they mean. Is it January or December, hundreds, or hundreds of thousands? Is the page even using automatic localisation features, or am I looking at things verbatim as the author entered them (and same if I were to enter such inputs). >I think the set of people that can be helped by this is smaller than >the set of people who can be harmed, and the risk of sites applying >this commonly is too great. It's very easy to imagine it becoming >"common wisdom" to set the page's CSS locale to the same as the HTML >lang, which harms most people's ability to use foreign sites. If not doing that is so obviously the right thing as you suggest, that seems an unlikely outcome. >Displaying data is different from setting the locale of inputs. This >proposal doesn't even attempt to do formatting of arbitrary data on >the page. The message that started this thread was clearly considering input and output. What is clearly lacking though is clear differentation between modes of input and output. Clearly a site does not need to control the localisation of a browser-controlled date picker that reliably and un- ambiguously conveys to the user how the site will interpret the input, for instance. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/
Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2015 04:05:52 UTC