On 04.12.12 11:53, Jean-Marc Desperrier wrote:
Norbert Lindenberg a écrit :
The ECMAScript Internationalization API [...] provides web applications
with the ability to format numbers, dates, and times and sort strings
according to the rules of the language that the application is using,
not the one that browser and OS default to.
If the OS doesn't support the language, those features are icing on the
cake when there's no cake.
Only a minority of users are multilingual, and the first thing they do
is install the support for the language they need on the OS.
In Internet café and the like, you'll see also people installing
multiple-language support on the OS, so that users get a correct support
for it, with the adequate fonts. In places where the need is real, they
frequently have a set of separate computer with each of them properly
configured for one specific language.
Actually, we just had a bug on adding our own fonts for people that
don't have their OS fully fleshed.
Additionally, quite a few users are multilingual. If I look at en-US
usage, only half of that is within the US, followed by India and Indonesia.
Also, OS support usually means support for the language the OS is
running in, not the language we use for Firefox.
On that note,
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=summary:toLocaleString
is a nice little subset of the issues we have with getting useful data
back from the OS, just took the simplest search I could come up with.
Axel
and even users who aren't
sometimes have to use browsers that don't support their language
ECMAScript i18n is not going to properly solve that problem
To implement that, we need good library support, and ICU fits the bill.
ICU is a massive, huge juggernaut. It fits the bill in professional
application that have no download size constraints, and no requirement
to support the low end of installed memory size. OS support is
incredibly more efficient. It does require more work, and has less
guaranties about always getting the same behavior. They both fit
different needs and constraints. The professional application is also a
context where properly formatting the string will be enough for the
language support of a remote user who has installed OS support locally.
I wished for proper ECMAScript i18n support for years, but never that
it'd forcefeed ICU on everybody.
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