What a Locale is.... (Re: [Fwd]: Response to Mark's message])
Addison Phillips [wM]
aphillips at webmethods.com
Mon Apr 14 10:46:56 CEST 2003
Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>
> I'm tempted to suggest a radical conclusion:
>
> The "locale" concept is unsuitable for reference in communications or
> data storage, and the word should therefore not be used on this mailing
> list.
>
I don't think this is radical at all. I've been saying that for years.
The issue here, as I see it, is the same one I started with. If you have
multi-lingual capable features in your system, you need external
software to indicate a language and cultural preference in order to
activate these features.
It turns out that software that uses HTTP or exchanges XML files already
has tags that allow this. For HTTP this is Accept-Language. For XML this
is the xml:lang attribute. These both use RFC3066.
If we could just solve the edge cases for language identification
(notoriously The Chinese Problem) we have solved 98% of the "locale
exchange problem" too, at least as far as I'm concerned.
There is still room for exchanging additional "international context"
information. Mark's example shows how this becomes more of a generic
software problem. There may be additional utility to exchanging
regionally linked "locale" information. Whether it is worth doing that
is an open question and, as noted, not appropriate here.
Best Regards,
Addison
--
Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
webMethods, Inc.
+1 408.962.5487 mailto:aphillips at webmethods.com
-------------------------------------------
Internationalization is an architecture. It is not a feature.
Chair, W3C I18N WG Web Services Task Force
http://www.w3.org/International/ws
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