RE: Euro mess (Was: valid locales ---> was bilingual websites

I agree, the currency and its symbol may not change when you change a 
locale, unless it is a product feature. A catalog for instance could 
provide the prices in the correct currency of the user's locale, for 
example. When you change your locale the prices show up in that countries 
currency.

The formatting change of the displayed currency depending on the locale is 
a different issue. What triggers the change of the display format? The 
language or the country or the currency or a mix of these? Example:

I am in the US with my PC set to en_US locale and I  looking at a German 
catalog with German prices and German language descriptions, actually a 
German website. How should the prices be displayed?

DEM 1,234.00 because of my en_US locale setting?
or
1.234,00 DEM because it is a German web page?

Getting the catalog in snail mail was easier, a German catalog has German 
formatting. We have been discussing this issue for a year now and have 
found no definite decision, yet.

I am sending the reply to the locales group 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/locales because we are discussing these 
issues there as well.

David Possin





"Carrasco Benitez Manuel" <Manuel.Carrasco@emea.eu.int>(by way of Martin 
Duerst <duerst
Sent by: www-international-request@w3.org
11/15/01 12:49 AM

 
        To:     www-international@w3.org
        cc: 
        Subject:        RE: Euro mess (Was: valid locales ---> was    bilingual websites


[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.