Locale Extensions

[ben-allen]

WebKittens

@constellation

Title of the spec

Locale Extensions

URL to the spec

https://github.com/ben-allen/locale-extensions/

URL to the spec's repository

https://github.com/ben-allen/locale-extensions/

Issue Tracker URL

No response

Explainer URL

https://github.com/ben-allen/locale-extensions/blob/main/README.md

TAG Design Review URL

No response

Mozilla standards-positions issue URL

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/844

WebKit Bugzilla URL

No response

Radar URL

No response

Description

Note: specification is out-of-date, see explainer instead.

On the Web platform, content is localized dependent only upon a user's language or region. However, this behavior can result in annoyance, frustration, offense, or even uninteligibility for some users.

Some example situations:

• Someone traveling overseas sees temperatures in Fahrenheit even though they are more familiar with Celsius.
• Someone is more familiar with 12-hour time, but Intl.DateTimeFormat is rendering 24-hour time.
• Someone sets their language dialect to one they can understand, but they prefer dates, times, and numbers to be rendered according to local standards.
  • Someone sees digits in an unfamiliar writing system.

In the native environment these problems do not occur, since users can specify these desired customizations in their system settings. However, the full amount of flexibility allowed for in the native environment is not possible in the potentially hostile web environment. This proposal defines a mechanism for making a limited subset of the Unicode Extensions for BCP 47 available for content negotiation, providing options that address some of the worst problems with incomplete localization while only exposing coarse-grained data about the users who take advantage of these improvements.

Read the complete Explainer Slide deck about Locale Extensions

Feedback

I welcome feedback in this thread, but encourage you to file bugs against

• The Explainer
• WICG Proposal

[Constellation]

Related to #140

[ben-allen]

I've made major revisions to the proposal, driven in part by feedback from WebKittens. These changes are reflected in the new explainer. I'd love to hear what you think! @litherum @Constellation

[annevk]

@ben-allen could you please restore the issue template? I'm pretty sure this won't work for summary.py.

[ben-allen]

Here's the slideset for a talk at TG2 on the proposal as stands.