Re: [css3-text] text-transform: han-numerals

On 10/29/2010 03:22 AM, Koji Ishii wrote:
>> Then, the decimal system is not good enough for converting numbers to han idegraphic
>> representations.  I prefer 三十五 to 三五 when it means 35.
>>
>> I think that the first version of CSS Text should stay away from such conversion.
> 
> I think it's better to understand this discussion in a little different way.
> 
>> From the requirement point of view, it is all about formatting numbers. I understand that.
> 
> In response, we as technical team are making two different offers.

Actually, we have three.

> One is to wait for full number formatting feature to be done in CSS Lists module.
> At this point, we're not sure if it can format all numbers within text or not.
> My personal guess at this point is no, it cannot, because parsing whole document
> and finding numbers within text isn't an easy task. It is possible that you may
> end up changing HTML to something like:
> <span style="format-number: ideograph">12</span>
> It may be more powerful than this, but at this point, we just don't know.

It probably won't be. And I don't think it should: how numbers should be
converted is very context-sensitive. It's not something to apply to an
entire paragraph, but to specific tagged spans or table cells with a
known type of contents, etc. You don't want the year "2000" to be converted
to "二千".

> The other offer is, all it can do is only code point transformations, but it can
> transform all digits to ideographic digits. It doesn't support full number
> formatting due to its nature, but it's cheap to implement and cheap to run.

The third option is what I outlined before: The author writes both representations
into the source like this:
  <abbr class="num" title="三十五">35</abbr>
and the style sheet can swap from the contents of <abbr> to the value of its
title attribute like this:
  abbr.num { content: attr(title); }

This method can handle any number format conversion, since the author is
providing the mapping himself. It's also consistent with HTML semantics
since the Arabic notation is an abbreviated representation of the contents
of the 'title' attribute. (It's equivalent to <abbr title="thirty-five">35</abbr>.)

> You can take both, either, or none. We're not saying, because you took this one,
> you have to give up another. The two are different features from technical
> point of view.

Agreed.

~fantasai

Received on Friday, 29 October 2010 18:35:38 UTC