RE: Euro mess (Was: valid locales ---> was bilingual websites from Carrasco Benitez Manuel on 2001-11-15 (www-international@w3.org from October to December 2001)

From: Carrasco Benitez Manuel <Manuel.Carrasco@emea.eu.int>
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 15:49:33 +0900
To: www-international@w3.org
Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.J.20011115154928.034439e0@localhost>

[CARRASCO]
Local *must not* change the currency symbol. For example,
if a text with the local England contain 」100.-, it must
not change to $100.- when the local is changed to USA.

Formating could change. For example, for some local X,
it could change to 100」. The key aspect is that only the
presentation is changed, but not the meaning: "please
transfer 100 British Pounds; not USA dollars or
Liras/Libras of country Y".

So in the case of the Euro Symbol, there are/will be
conventions for the different local how to format it:
in front, at the back or other aspects such as joined to
the first figure.

Regarding encoding, users would choose whatever they like
and can use with their available systems.

If am encoding HTML in ISO-8859-1, I will use "&euro;" as
it is makes the HTML source more readable that is I use
"&#8364;" or "&#x20A1;". Also less error prone, for example
the previous hex code is the "Colon" (C with to bars that
it could be considere an over-artistic Euro Symbol). The
Euro is "&#x20AC".

Aspects that deal with the calculation of the euro are
outside the scope of this list.

Regards
Tomas

[BROWN]
If you do locale sensitive currency formatting the currency symbol and
positioning will change.  This means that you will get a text stream in
Unicode for example and then have to translate it to the HTML code page.
You can either scan for U+20AC and insert "&euro;" or convert all
non-translatable characters to NCRs such as "&#8364;".  This is a better
approach as it is more general.

Received on Thursday, 15 November 2001 01:50:23 UTC