- From: Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com>
- Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:50:55 +0100
- To: "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Tab Atkins Jr. writes: > I would be inclined to take the English tradition (, as thousands > separator, . as decimal separator) as the default, as it is more > common on the web than the other. Otherwise, there is *literally* no > way to resolve the ambiguity. Yes there is: with commas or other punctuation characters the algorithm for parsing 2 numbers from a string will fail. Displaying nothing (which an author is likely to notice, and which a user is less likely to believe as correct) is much better than displaying the wrong number. Many uses of <progress> will involve small integers, which use neither decimal points nor thousands separators, or integer percentages. Many people don't put thousands separators in numbers, especially not those which are only 4 or 5 digits long. HTML mark-up itself uses a full stop for a decimal point, so authors are likely to be familiar with it. Programatically calculated percentages (whether in JavaScript or a server-side language) as floating point numbers inserted into the document are likely to stringify using a decimal point by default, so will just work without any additional effort by the developer. The above together cover many uses of <progress>. Anybody with more complex requirements can still achieve them by explicitly using the value attribute, just as they would have to do without the content parsing feature; content parsing adds convenience which can be used in many cases but takes nothing away. Making simple cases easy while still ensuring that complex cases are possible strikes me as a sensible balance. Smylers
Received on Saturday, 15 August 2009 06:51:34 UTC