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

On Oct 29, 2010, at 11:34 AM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:

> 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>.)

How about a fourth option for general number formatting? For instance (where "d" stands for "digit"):

Number-format: "d,ddd.dd"; /* comma separators and decimals to two places */

Number-format: "d.ddd*"; /* comma separators and decimals to at least three places */

Number-format: localize; /* set separators and decimals markers to local standard */

Number-format: "didid"; /* ideographic "place" separators and no change to decimal market. Perhaps in Western scripts this one is the same as adding commas or localized equiv.?  */

Number-format: "d"; /* digits only, for phone numbers, serial numbers, etc. */