[whatwg] Client side value for language preference

[Tim Streater]

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