Re: Summary of I18N discussion in HTML WG today

On 02/11/2012 19:22, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
>  > with a caveat from Cameron that BCP47 does not have way of indicating
> the Islamic calendar. He'll figure that out with Richard.

If I recall correctly, I got the impression that Cameron thought that 
BCP47 values could not be used with the calendar attribute - rather than 
that BCP didn't allow for calendar identification. Cameron please set me 
straight on that, if I'm wrong.

For the record, let me also mention why I was recommending a separate 
attribute rather than the lang attribute to give the locale of the date 
format for an input method.

One reason is that the lang attribute is always used to identify the 
language of the text within an element, and I feel that specifying a 
locale for a calendar is not the same thing.

A build on this reason would be where you have additional content which 
is not in the same language - let's say, for example, that the element 
that points to a calendar locale such as, say, ar-u-ca-islam has a title 
attribute also, and that the language of that attribute text is German - 
not common, but possible.  If you used lang to identify the calendar 
locale you would be (incorrectly) declaring the content of the title 
attribute to be arabic. If you have a lang=de calendar=ar-u-ca-islam you 
would be fine. This example illustrates the need to not overload the 
lang attribute, to my mind.

That said, I would happily agree that, if information from a calendar 
attribute was unavailable, the browser could *guess* the locale from 
information provided by a lang attribute.  But that would just be a 
fallback.

RI

Received on Friday, 9 November 2012 15:37:24 UTC