6  Locale

The user interface defines which language the text supplied with the product is shown in.

By default, if a matching user interface language exists for a new locale, it will be set as User and suffixed with ✔, otherwise the User, of the master locale will be used, otherwise English (en) will be used. Any other language can be selected at any time, but is not recommended. The rendering direction of pages is according to the locale in force, not the reading direction of the user interface language. While user languages of the opposite reading direction can be selected, do so only if necessary.

The user interface setting explicitly defines what letters appear for alphabetic list and table items, but also the numerals used for footnotes and the time displayed in the Sequence element. These are both due to the underlying technologies not providing a means of enumerating the sequence of either of these for the current locale. Conversely, all other numerals are able to be be rendered in the script of the current locale.

Not using the user interface that matches the locale may cause these situations to show mismatched text between them, which is why it is not recommended to change the User setting if it was set to the matching language during installation or when a new locale is added. The situation that being able to change the setting is for is when a matching language is not available for the selected locale, so allowing one that might be more suitable for target audience to use, but also to be able to change to a matching language if it does become available.

Websites have been heavily influence by the US, and this has even influenced what punctuation might have replaced what has traditionally been used.

Except for the soft hyphen, only text provided by the product interface is affected by changing these. User-provided text is unaffected, but it needs to be consistent with the interface usage. Setting Soft hyphen will turn off auto-hyphenation for the locale.

With the pervasiveness of the web by English, largely due to to the domination of the early web by US companies, many site owners may be used to using English punctuation characters on web pages, rather than what their country's style guide says for their language, as happened with quotation marks. The Overrides are provided to specify which characters are used for the cited usages in the rendered user interface text, so that they match what has been used in the rest of the site content. These will likely not be needed for many Latin scripts.

Rich-text elements, like a paragraph, should normally not be written to end in a full stop. A full stop is appended at rendering time if the final character is not a Unicode punctuation character, even if it is within a quote. If the Full stop (.) override is selected, it is the character that will be appended.

The time element, for most of its settings, is fully generated according to the locale. While extremely flexible in how dates and times are formatted using it, especially for different calendars and locales, for those settings, the text and numbers cannot be separately generated. That means that while other numerals can be overridden, the time element's numerals cannot. That may preclude its use in some circumstances if overring numerals.

Typically, each nation has an official style guide that specifies which quotes to use, but while newspapers may use that, online outlets tend to use what their readers expect, which often means the US “ ‘ ’ ”. Look at what the online news sites that your target audience likely uses to see what might be best to use. See Related sites for some links for research.

There are some considerations in using locales.

After adding a locale, ensure all non-main subsites and categories have had all their texts defined for that locale before enabling it. For articles that do not have that locale enabled in the Details section of their Article head page until their texts have been translated, they will fall-through to an enabled locale, and show a message above their header indicating that the locale is unavailable and which one is being used for display. All links on the page will still use the intended locale to maximise locale continuity while traversing the site.

Having /-/ at the end of the path of links to other Smallsite Design sites will add the current locale and accessibility status to facilitate experience continuity between them. They must be before any query or fragment. With an incoming link that specifies a locale, Smallsite Design will attempt to find a matching locale, else one that may have a different region, else use the master locale.

Locales have a deep influence on the operation of a site, so there are some restrictions on what can be done with them.

A locale can only be renamed within the same language and script, so only different regions are offered as options. The restriction is because renaming to another language or script would not alter existing text, so renaming an English locale to something like Japanese would not make sense. Also, a browser's spelling and grammar tools would likely indicate a lot of errors with such mismatches. If a locale cannot be renamed, after Cannot: will be Editing articles as a jump to the In progress section of the Work list page.

A locale can only be renamed within the same language and script, so only different regions are offered as options. The restriction is because renaming to another language or script would not alter existing text, but a browser's spelling and grammar tools would likely indicate a lot of errors.