>why would the country you are in and the language you are currently speaking NOT decide those things (which are defined by said languages.) Because these have

>why would the country you are in and the language you are currently speaking NOT decide those things (which are defined by said languages.) Because these have no relation to how a particular piece of content should be formatted. The fundamental mistake made by many of these legacy APIs with respect to localization is the assumption that the locale should be determined based on some property of the user, which is reflected in some OS or application-wide setting that applies to all content. This only works as a rough approximation in the small minority of cases where the user is a member of a cultural sphere / bubble where exposure to multiple languages is a rare exception, like the united states. In the rest of the world, it is an everyday occurrance for multiple languages to exist side by side, including within individual web pages, documents, spreadsheets, and other content, which is why the only reasonable solution is the one where a locale is a property of a piece of content in its most atomic form, not of the user.