Would be nice if it automatically uses degrees Celcius instead of Fahrenheit if the location is Europe. Also for visibility and wind speed, km instead of mi.
I considered handling this with some coarse longitude heuristic, but settled on just using the browser's locale for now, so it should default to metric for non-US locales. In the metric setting, the visibility and wind speed will be km and km/h, respectively.
Locale, in practice on the web, is mostly about language (fortunately!). I’m Dutch in NL and my browser (and OS!) is set to prefer en-US. Most of my friends do too. Dutch software UI translations are terribly cringey.
To me, that means I prefer English UI text but it doesn’t suddenly mean I want my units in arms and ounces and firestoves or whatever weird shit you Anglosaxons do :-)
I recognize that formally this is me breaking the locale model, but if so, then that’s a flaw in the design of locales and not a flaw in me. At the risk of ranting a bit, the idea that I can’t have a Color Picker named “Color Picker” without also bending over and accepting Fahrenheit is just weird to me. Lumping all this stuff together (don’t get me started on number formatting!) into a single 5-character language-and-region code is just dumb. The model assumes one dimensional einheitswurst humans who do as they’re told in primary school, never move away from their home town and never learn a second language. It sucks.
Let’s be happy so many websites get this right and treat locale as a language selector only.
(Meta sidenote, “Einheitswurst”, literally “unit sausage” but kinda also “unity sausage” which gives this word for dullness a delightful political angle, has got to be the second-best word in the German language)