Urgent call for clarification of Armenian numbering rules

CSS 2.1 allows you to number list items using Armenian numbers, but doesn't provide any details about how that works.  The CSS3 Lists module does provide detailed implementation advice, but a couple of things have been called into question about how it should work. IE8 CR1 implements numbering exactly as per the CSS3 spec, but other major browsers exhibit differences. We have a very small window in which to check whether the spec is correct before IE8 is frozen.

See the description of Armenian numbering in CSS3 [1].

See a slightly different description in Wikipedia [2].

There are two questions arising from comparing the links above:

1. is 7000 expressed as Ւ U+0552  or ՈՒ U+0548 U+0552 ?

2. is an appropriate default for 'armenian' upper- or lowercase?

3. is the glyph that indicates values over 9,999 a circumflex or a line


For results of tests [4] on recent browser versions see our results page [3].

Summary [
All user agents tested support list-style-type: armenian as far as 9,999, except IE7. However, Firefox and Opera use Ւ not ՈՒ for 7,000, and all but IE8 CR1 default to uppercase rather than the specified lowercase. IE8 is the only user agent completely compliant with the CSS3 Lists module.

Only Safari, Chrome and IE8 support numbers above 9,999 (although this is a high number for a list, so the impact of that is probably less than for lower numbers).
]

If you have knowledge of Armenian numbering, please send your thoughts on the questions above asap.  
Thank you.

RI


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-lists/#lower-armenian

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_numerals

[3] http://www.w3.org/International/tests/results/results-list-style-type-armenian

[4] http://www.w3.org/International/tests/css/test-list-style-type-2

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 10:09:59 UTC