- From: Matthew Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 22:39:08 +1200
On 19 Jun, 2004, at 1:29 PM, Dean Edwards wrote: > ... > now can someone suggest some suitable date and number formatting > patterns please? > ... For dates, I suggest "short", "long", and "longwithday". To present these, UAs would use the user's preferred short and long date formats -- as set for example in the "Regional Settings" control panel in Microsoft Windows, and in the "International" System Preferences panel in Mac OS X. This would be the most polite, I think; it would be irritating and confusing for Web authors to be able to specify m/d/y format, for example, when all the native programs on the user's OS were using d/m/y format. (Web authors could use some other method to output a confusing format if they really wanted to, but Web Forms shouldn't go out of its way to help them.) Similarly for numbers, I think it would be best not to have any patterns, beyond saying "this is a number". The OS already provides global settings for what the thousands separator should be and what the decimal point should look like; people shouldn't have to re-specify these settings, or have them ignored, for every Web application they use. And allowing inconsistency with those settings -- for example allowing Web authors to specify "," when all the user's native programs were using ".", and vice versa -- could cause severe mistakes. OSes also have settings for displaying currency, but I think these would be inappropriate for Web use, because Web sites are often referring to currencies other than the user's local one. And prefixing or affixing currency symbols hardly needs help from special Web Forms markup. -- Matthew Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Saturday, 19 June 2004 03:39:08 UTC