From: Ed Trager (ed.trager@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 17 2009 - 22:14:15 CDT
Hi, everyone,
I'm working on some ideas for providing better support for localization in
some "Web 2.0" applications.
For example, consider a typical web form that asks for name, address, date
of birth, etc. For better or for worse, we can envision presenting the user
with a default form in English. At the top of the page, the form might have
a drop-down selection list allowing users to choose alternate languages for
the form - French, German, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, etc. ...
If we can detect the user's locale, we can present the form immediately in
the language specified by (any non-English) locale instead of the English
fallback. Of course we will still have the drop-down selection list so
users can still get any of the alternative language versions of the form if
they want.
Browsers such as Firefox (FF), Opera (OP), and Safari (SF) appear to
provide:
navigator.language
... while versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) provide:
navigator.browserLanguage
navigator.systemLanguage
navigator.userLanguage
My first question: Is this all that is available?
From a limited investigation on a Windows Vista "en-US" PC, I see that
navigator.language is set to "en-US" in FF and SF, but Opera only returns
"en". IE also returns "en-US" but in the IE-specific variables. When I
installed the Thai version of FF, I got just "th", not "th-TH" or, say,
"th-US".
So my 2nd question: Beyond the basic "language" code ("en", "th", "fr",
etc.) I guess there is no reliable way within the browser environment to
determine more specific locale information?
For example, (3rd question...) am I correct in assuming that I *cannot*
determine date format preferences? For example, if a browser like Opera is
only going to tell me "en" and not "en-GB" or "en-US" or "en-AnywhereElse",
then I guess there's no way to localize the date format to a preferred
locale?
(As an aside, I just want to make it known to everyone that I personally
*despise* localised date formats and think *everyone* all over the world
should just use ISO YYYY-MM-DD format. That's my own "Ivory Tower" opinion,
of course ... But here I am just asking the question ... )
(4th Question ...) So I guess it is completely moot to think one could find
out about preferred currency or numeric formats, or anything else that a
"thick" client might be able to discover from operating system environment
variables that I suppose are never really exposed within the browser
environment?
- Ed
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