A great new tool

Today Sabine told me about The Locale generator. This represents a great opportunity. It allows people to define what the many settings that are part of the CLDR are. The values defined here are of relevance to things like how you show a date, how to quote etcetera.

Even though it is a great start, there are things inherently problematic. The way languages are referred to are also not necessarily unambiguous. The language names do refer to the ISO-639-1 while the documentation calls them ISO-639-2. ISO-639-2 exists in two flavors ...

The generated XML content is targeted for use with Open Office, they do a good job by including references to what Microsoft does. Sorting out their non-standard ways. Initiatives like this make me really happy. The next step that they could take is to provide the information created in this way to the Unicode people so that they can integrate it in the CLDR itself. When this trickles back into tools like PHP, Python and Java, thing will be really to look up. :)

Thanks,
GerardM