Formats, locale, regionale settings

Formats, locale, regionale settings

Hello,

As a future and much needed enhancement, would it be possible to set our own locale settings instead of using Country/Language in the account settings?

For example, the locale for French Canada is different than for English Canada :

Number/currency :
en-ca : $123,456,789.00
fr-ca : 123 456 789,00 $
Time :
en-ca : 23:45:12 or 11:45:12 PM
fr-ca : 23:45:12
Short date :
en-ca : 01/15/2008
fr-ca : 2008-01-15 or, sometimes, 15-01-2008
Long date :
en-ca : January 15, 2008
fr-ca : 15 janvier 2008

Also, you could always create a ISO/SI locale which follows :
- ISO 31-0/ISO 80000 for the decimal sign i.e. "decimal sign is either the comma on the line or the point on the line" (let's make it user selectable),
- ISO 31-0/ISO 80000 for the digit grouping i.e. "Numbers may be divided in groups of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots nor commas are ever inserted in the spaces between groups" (space is the de facto standard, again, user selectable?)
- ISO 8601 for the date (yyyy-MM-dd) and time (HH:mm:ss),
- SI for the currency : 1234,56 � (or ISO 4217 : 1234,56 USD which is even better)

If I may suggest, the user's locale should be semantically independent from the format so that a US-English user could see his date in his own locale (01/15/2008) , the entered number having been entered in a different locale. To help you out, this is a list of the different semantically formats that I found in Excel, Google Docs, Zoho, etc. :
- Plain old text
- Semantically Rich text (Wiki)
- Number - normal, represented in base 10
- Number in base X, fraction (%, binary, hexadecimal, scientific, 23/45, etc.)
- Currency/unit (100,00 $, 100 km)
- Date-time/date/time
- Custom mask (postal code, phone numbers, etc.)

Finally, I would hope that the account UI language is independent from the user's account locale setting and from the language setting from her browser.

Thanks,

Eric