Palm webOS defines a locale conventionally as a combination of language and region, and initially includes support for some Latin-1 languages and related regions. The first products will include all North and South American languages and regions as well as some of the Western European languages and regions.
The choice of language indicates the primary localization, while the regional settings govern date formats, number formats, and similar types of data representation. You can mix any language and any region to create a locale. For example, en_DE is the English language and German regional settings. A complete list of supported languages and keyboard mappings is provided in Table 11-1, with some of the more common locales and regions.
Table 11-1. Supported Languages and Regions
Locale | Language | Region | Keyboard |
|---|---|---|---|
en_US | English (en) | United States (US) | QWERTY |
en_GB | English (en) | Great Britain (GB) | QWERTY |
en_IE | English (en) | Ireland (IE) | QWERTY |
es_US | Spanish (es) | United States (US) | QWERTY |
es_ES | Spanish (es) | Spain (ES) | QWERTY |
en_CA | English (en) | Canada (CA) | QWERTY |
| fr_CA | French (fr) | Canada (CA) | AZERTY |
de_DE | German (de) | Germany (DE) | QWERTZ |
it_IT | Italian (it) | Italy (IT) | QWERTY |
fr_FR | French (fr) | France (FR) | AZERTY |
The architecture is capable of supporting most single-byte and double-byte locales, but the initial release does not include the necessary fonts, input methods, and some of the text-processing utilities needed to fully support those locales. Additional support will be provided over time, but availability will depend upon regional business priorities. If you follow the techniques discussed in this chapter, your application should be ready to support those locales when available.
There are many more regions supported than those shown in Table 11-1, and additional regions are added frequently. You’ll find the current list on the Palm developer site.
The initial Palm webOS devices ship with a Unicode UTF-8 character set, primarily supported by the Prelude font, which was described from a style and design perspective in Chapter 7. Prelude supports the following character sets, as defined by Windows codepages:
1250 (Eastern Europe)
1251 (Cyrillic)
1252 (Latin 1 or Western Europe)
1253 (Greek)
1254 (Turkish)
1257 (Baltic)
Additional fonts are included to support conventional browser content. The browser fonts support the character sets named above, plus all the characters used for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
The keyboards will track the available locales. For example, QWERTY, QWERTZ, and AZERTY configurations are provided with the locales as described in Table 11-1. This is not something that will be uniform across webOS devices, so while some form of keyboard or input method support is provided, you cannot expect a typical configuration.