Locales

A locale is a user's preferred language and country settings, as set on their computer.

For Hi HelpIndex, the user's locale can be used to determine the default index and language file to show. So an English user would see your English index file, while a French one would see your French index.
Note that further distinctions are possible, ie you could have one index file for North American English users (eg which uses a spelling of "color") and have another index file for United Kingdom English users (eg which spells it "colour").

Hi HelpIndex only supports locales in browsers which support JDK 1.1.

Locale Codes

The locale field can be used to specify a language code and optionally can be followed by a country code. The default is "en" for English (with no country code).

The first two characters of the locale field give the ISO Language Code. These codes are the lower-case two-letter codes as defined by ISO-639. Here is a full list of language codes taken from http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt

If supplied, the next two characters of the locale field give the ISO Country Code. These codes are the upper-case two-letter codes as defined by ISO-3166. Here is a full list of country codes taken from http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/diverse/doc/ISO_3166.html

Example locale fields

en	English
enGB	English, United Kingdom
fr	French
frFR	French, France
frCA	French, Canada
de	German
ja	Japanese

Common Language and Country Codes