env(date), env(time), env(date-time)

Hello i18n-core,

Some browsers offer to print the URL, the date, or the time when
printing web content. To make this feature more configurable -- both
for browser vendors, for authors, and for users -- there is a proposal
in CSS3 to format these according to the environment/locale of the
formatter [1]. For example, consider this snippet:

  @page {
    @top-right { content: env(date) }
    @bottom-right { content: env(time) }
  }

The resulting printout (or PDF file, perhaps) would show the date in
the upper right corner, and the time in the lower right corner
according the the environment/locale of the formatter. To support this
feature, UAs would need to fetch the date/time/date-time of the local
system. This seems quite doable and the current draft states in a note:

  On many systems, preformatted strings in the user's locale can be
  found through the strftime [2] function. The date, time and date-time
  strings can be found by using the "%x", "%X" and "%c" conversion
  strings, respectively.

I'm running the text by this group to see if it is (a) correct, or (b)
can be improved. 

The proposal is kept simple on purpose. As such, it allows style
sheets to refer to the locale of the formatter, but not to other
locales.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/#string-set
[2] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/strftime.html

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Tuesday, 25 May 2010 18:43:24 UTC