Internationalization proposal: some comments...

[Phillips, Addison]

Hi,

I reviewed the thread at [1] and wanted to contribute a few comments on the strawman proposal at [2]. 

I think this effort is important. Many of us have struggled with the lack of ready internationalization support within ECMAScript and server-side or custom processing are both unsatisfying as a solution. During the W3C TPAC last year, some of us interested in this problem met with TC39 and made a number of suggestions [3] that I hope will be taken up for consideration---some of these are covered by this proposal.

WRT the strawman, I had these comments:

1. The Locale class should have a matches() method or methods that permit locale/language negotiation to be implemented. RFC 4647 matching (either filtering or lookup) are far more common than pure equality checks.

2. Should there be a Locale.getDefault?

3. Should there be a TimeZone.getDefault()?

4. The Collator doesn't include rule-based collation? Is that planned for the future?

5. I know that other APIs are planned for the future, but message and number format are equally (often more) important than dates. I wouldn't want them omitted in an initial implementation.

I hope to see progress on this work in the future.

Regards,

Addison 

[1] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2010-June/011380.html
[2] http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AW406aVETP5_ZGh0dHJxNXZfMGM4azV2a2Ro&hl=en 
[3] http://www.w3.org/International/wiki/JavaScriptInternationalization 

Addison Phillips

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.