Re: Euro currency sign

On Wed, 15 Oct 1997, Rob wrote:

> > An entity should be included in HTML for the euro.  It is proposed:
> > 
> >                    €
> 
> Hey, why not an entity name for every possible currency sign? Heck, add 
> religious symbols and national flags too. Yuck!
> 
> Seriously, at this stage in HTML's development adding new entities is a 
> messy proposition.

Maybe. It can also be entered, with HTML 4.0, as &#x????;, where
you have to substitute ???? by the actual codepoint (in hex) in
Unicode. You can also use the more traditional &#?????;, but then
you have to do hex->dec conversion.

> Adding some type of general entity or element that takes into account a 
> document's language and region and formats the currency, thousanth 
> markers and decimals would be a nice idea... if you could travel back in 
> time to amend the original HTML draft. It's a bit late to add something 
> like that as well.

There was a proposal like this, in the first draft of what became
later RFC 2070 (HTML i18n). But it has many problems. The biggest
problem is that you can't just covert e.g. from USD to Euro when
you present, because the conversion rate changes daily, you don't
know which conversion rate is appropriate (might be a page with
historic stuff), and you have legal implications (automatically
converting an offer in USD to an offer in Euro is not what somebody
offering goods on the web would agree to). As for the rest of the
presentation (decimal point,...), that also can easily be done
at the server, because it has to agree with the rest of the document.
These formatting details are peanuts when compared to translating
the actual text :-). So proposals in this direction (including
measurements, time,...) met heavy resistance and had to be dropped.
On a new base, maybe XML, such things might of course again be
discussed.


Regards,	Martin.

Received on Thursday, 16 October 1997 06:26:39 UTC