Re: Technically: What is the point to identity to country/province, anyway?
Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 09:26:42AM +0700, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim wrote:
>> I still have no clue on why "country/province" information is
>> technically needed. Sure, "language" is needed, and so does "time zone",
>> "keyboard", etc. But for what is "country"?
>
> It's used for:
>
> - collation order of text
Not country-related; this is strictly language/dialect related.
> - currency symbols and formatting
This one is probably the closest to being actually country-based, though
even there it isn't always, as a few countries have multiple simultaneous
currencies.
> - numeric formatting characteristics (thousands separator, decimal point)
Again, varies within some countries. And so on.
> - characteristics of time representation (24/12h, : vs ., ...)
Again, not really purely country-based. Here in the US, it's 24-hour if
you're in the military, 12-hour if you're not,...
> - paper size (in theory)
Heh. This definitely varies at a below-country level!
> any or all of which can vary per country, even among countries which use
> the same language.
Even within *one* country. :-P
> It also can be used to support separate regional translations where
> dialects are sufficiently different to warrant it,
Unless the dialects are in the same country. :-P
> and can also
> distinguish between locales which use different character sets to
> represent the same language.
Unless they're in the same country. :-P
> Oh, and it's also a good heuristic for guessing the user's timezone,
Unless the country has multiple time zones, in which case it just restricts
it to a smaller list. :-P
> keyboard,
Well, sort of; *collection* of keyboards to choose from is more like it.
And that's more language-based anyway....
> *and* mirror of choice,
Likely to be wrong for large countries, and likely to be absent for small
countries. :-P
> making it much more likely that we can
> present the correct default option to the user for each of these
> selections.
OK, I guess what I'm saying is that country-based defaults are *very* rough
and not really that good. I suppose they're better than nothing,
though. :-)
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