- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 11:57:00 PDT
- To: Michael Everson <everson@indigo.ie>
- CC: "Martin J. D?rst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>, Carrasco Benitez Manuel <manuel.carrasco@emea.eudra.org>, "'Rob'" <wlkngowl@unix.asb.com>, www-international@w3.org, www-html@w3.org
While workstation localization to user preferences is a great idea
for lots of software, user interfaces, and most likely XML documents,
it is completely inappropriate for plain HTML. You might
want locale processing for embedded programs, e.g., you might want
your java applet to be able to say "present this number
as currency 'blah' to the user, using whatever the appropriate
font and locale might be", but for simple HTML pages themselves,
the entire page needs to be localized.
We went through this topic at length before, must we revisit it?
It's trying to solve a problem that nobody has. I claim there are no
simple HTML pages in the many millions of web pages in the world that
would actually work better for anyone if "," and "." were presented
properly according to the user's preferences, but no other translation
or localization were made. You can easily prove me wrong by
finding some realistic examples (er, don't construct one), but
until you do, can we please drop the topic on the mailing list?
("angels on head of pin" = "number of web pages that would use
a useless feature").
Regards,
Larry
--
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter
Received on Monday, 20 October 1997 14:58:31 UTC