[whatwg] Client side value for language preference

Bronislav Klučka Bronislav.Klucka at bauglir.com
Thu Apr 5 11:31:35 PDT 2012



On 30.3.2012 17:41, Tim Streater wrote:
> On 30 Mar 2012 at 16:05, Jukka K. Korpela<jkorpela at cs.tut.fi>  wrote:
>
>> 2012-03-30 17:22, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Matthew Nuzum<newz at bearfruit.org>   wrote:
>>>> For example, maybe a site can't afford translation but a small library
>>>> could be included that formats dates and numbers based on a user's
>>>> language preference. No more wondering if 2/3/12 is in March or in
>>>> February.
>>> The reader doesn't know that the site tries to be smart about dates
>>> (but not smart enough to just use ISO dates),
>> It’s not smart to use ISO dates, which are not what the majority of
>> mankind is used to. Sometimes ISO dates are the least if evils, but they
>> are not proper localisation.
> +1
>
>>> so scrambling the order
>>> of date components not to match the convention of the language of the
>>> page is probably worse than using the convention that's congruent with
>>> the language of the page.
>> But what might that be, and how does it relate to the formats that
>> <input type=date>  and relatives are supposed to deal with?
>>
>> There is absolutely no way in HTML, in HTML 4 or in HTML5, to say that
>> input of dates should be accepted according to a specific convention.
>> What users get is an US convention, or a local convention as per the
>> browser, quite independently of the (declared or implied) locale of the
>> page.
> There's no way to ask the OS what the user prefers, I suppose?
>
> --
> Cheers  --  Tim

Well you can ask Windows and Linux for date/time format settings... dont 
know about other OS though...

Brona




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