[Sigia-l] notation for locales

[James Aylett]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 12:48:38AM -0400, Ziya Oz wrote:

> > I normally notate this as a pair of words or codes, such as
> > "CN-FR" or "Canada, French".
> 
> You may have to adjust the granularity of that. :-) For example, one of
> NYC's boroughs, Queens (USA>NY>NYC>Queens), has more than 135 languages
> spoken by about 2 million people in not more than 100 sq miles. And that's
> not even the most populous NYC borough.

The question being at what level of granularity you're actually going
to have to work. At its most granular, a locale is a single person :-)
[1]

Most situations aren't going to need anything more granular than
two-part language codes ('fr-ca') for now. However something like a
website that provides city-local information might want to know which
city a user is in, and which language they prefer (out of a range of
languages spoken in that city, perhaps) to enable them to filter/order
search results, change up-sell panels, and various other pieces of
slightly more subtle localisation than just translation, layout,
colour, collation, date format and so on. (For instance, if you're in
Brighton, UK it's entirely reasonable to go to London for the evening;
it may be less reasonable to go to somewhere that's actually closer,
if the transport options are against you.)

All of which is, I think, going a bit further than this thread
originally warranted ;-)

James

[1] Okay, strictly it's a point in space. But actually we don't care
about the place when we're talking about the web, so our locales are
going to be slightly strange shapes...

-- 
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org