Supporting locales

Having internationalization support throughout all our components is a good idea. In fact, there're a lot of JavaScript tools out there to aid with this task. Some are more stand-alone, and some are more tailored for specific frameworks. Using these tools is easy, but there's a lot more to localization that needs to be taken into consideration, especially in a scaling context.

Deciding on locales to support

Once we have software with internationalization support that's in production use, the next step is to decide which locales to support. When we go through the first step of ensuring that all our components are internationalized, we do so with just one locale—the default locale. And that's fine at first, it may be years before our first secondary locale support requirement.

This is generally what happens with newer software projects. We know that internationalization should be up there on our list of priorities, but it's easy to get sidetracked with everything else going...