Perhaps they don't quite get it just yet, #1

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/09/11 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/09/11/4860978.aspx

I'll be the first person that standards are a good thing. And when I say that, I want you to fully grok what I mean. I mean that they are truly A Good Thing™, you know?

But the truth is they often represented an idealized view of the world.

And in the real world when faced with the realities of backward compatibility, release schedules, customer scenarios, and so on, a software product might not live up to a standard in every possible way that it could....

I mean it seems like a marriage made in Akron¹ when you take the fact that LCIDs suck.

Then add to it the additional fact that LANGIDs suck more.

And then juxtapose these facts with our assumption that Office might kind of get it now and decided to make sure that locale names were a part of the new Office Open XML standard since they make so much more sense that numbers (which was perhaps proof that Bill Poser's concern had been noted and addressed.

You might be fooled into believing that since Office chose to make their format support locale names, that it means that Office understood the point I was making about the extreme suckage of LCIDs and LANGIDs and that LCIDs were the stuff of old.

But if might be best not to break out the champagne just yet, though.

It's that whole standards are an idealized view of the world thing, if you know what I mean.

There a bunch of places that will store them in their files.

And there are bits and pieces of Office that will use locale names in their functionality.

A few might even know what to do if you were to create a file following the standard that had just a locale name and no LCID/LANGID value in it.

But a whole bunch of Office won't handle names (from the Office "Set Language" functionality on down, and almost none of it will (in any version) support anything outside of its known list of locales (all of which have LCID values associated with them).

So why are they in the standard, you might be wondering?

Well, there is that whole idealized view idea -- perhaps there is an intent to support them some day.

I'll tell you what -- I will give it a try and see what happens. Full report tomorrow....

1 - The rubber capitol of the world -- meaning that everything works well, with no consequences.

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