Re: Urgent call for clarification of Armenian numbering rules

Hi!

See also http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenische_Zahlen, which gives
characters also for 10000 and 20000.

I don't know anything about Armenian numbers beyond what you have pointed
to, or can find by web search.

However, the text in http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-lists/#lower-armenian is a
bit worrying. It says:

"The two characters for the 7000 digit should be combined and rendered as
one character. When the U+0302 character combines with the 7000 characters,
it does so as if the two characters were one."

But U-0302 does not, and should not, work that way. If 7000 is really
represented by two characters that are ligated that way, expecting ALSO that
U+0302 to work like described in the CSS3 document (not using 1DCD;COMBINING
DOUBLE CIRCUMFLEX ABOVE and ZWJ), then there is a need to allocate two new
ARMENIAN LIGATURE characters (upper- and lowercase) for this combination
rendered as a must-be ligature. But since it seems like that the "two
characters" for 7000 in Armenian numerals seems to be a mistake (given at
least two Wikipedia articles that appear to be independently written), this
seems to be an error in CSS3 rather than anything else.

http://www.easycalculation.com/funny/numerals/armenian.php also gives just a
single character for 7000 (though that page does not seem to be entirely
independent...)

        /kent k



Den 2009-01-29 11.09, skrev "Richard Ishida" <ishida@w3.org>:

> 
> CSS 2.1 allows you to number list items using Armenian numbers, but doesn't
> provide any details about how that works.  The CSS3 Lists module does provide
> detailed implementation advice, but a couple of things have been called into
> question about how it should work. IE8 CR1 implements numbering exactly as per
> the CSS3 spec, but other major browsers exhibit differences. We have a very
> small window in which to check whether the spec is correct before IE8 is
> frozen.
> 
> See the description of Armenian numbering in CSS3 [1].
> 
> See a slightly different description in Wikipedia [2].
> 
> There are two questions arising from comparing the links above:
> 
> 1. is 7000 expressed as Ւ U+0552  or ՈՒ U+0548 U+0552 ?
> 
> 2. is an appropriate default for 'armenian' upper- or lowercase?
> 
> 3. is the glyph that indicates values over 9,999 a circumflex or a line
> 
> 
> For results of tests [4] on recent browser versions see our results page [3].
> 
> Summary [
> All user agents tested support list-style-type: armenian as far as 9,999,
> except IE7. However, Firefox and Opera use Ւ not ՈՒ for 7,000, and all but IE8
> CR1 default to uppercase rather than the specified lowercase. IE8 is the only
> user agent completely compliant with the CSS3 Lists module.
> 
> Only Safari, Chrome and IE8 support numbers above 9,999 (although this is a
> high number for a list, so the impact of that is probably less than for lower
> numbers).
> ]
> 
> If you have knowledge of Armenian numbering, please send your thoughts on the
> questions above asap.
> Thank you.
> 
> RI
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-lists/#lower-armenian
> 
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_numerals
> 
> [3] 
> http://www.w3.org/International/tests/results/results-list-style-type-armenian
> 
> [4] http://www.w3.org/International/tests/css/test-list-style-type-2
> 
> ============
> Richard Ishida
> Internationalization Lead
> W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
> 
> http://www.w3.org/International/
> http://rishida.net/
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 14:49:37 UTC