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 - currency symbols and formatting - numeric formatting characteristics (thousands separator, decimal point) - characteristics of time representation (24/12h, : vs ., ...) - paper size (in theory) any or all of which can vary per country, even among countries which use the same language. It also can be used to support separate regional translations where dialects are sufficiently different to warrant it, and can also distinguish between locales which use different character sets to represent the same language. Oh, and it's also a good heuristic for guessing the user's timezone, keyboard, *and* mirror of choice, making it much more likely that we can present the correct default option to the user for each of these selections. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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