[whatwg] Something for the end-user??

While it makes sense to use the OS settings, a way to override them is
probably still needed.  Amazon.com wants to calculate in dollars, even
if you are coming from germany.


On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 22:39:08 +1200, Matthew Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 06:41:31 UTC