Re: Separating large numbers

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Yahia wrote:

> I would like to know if there's going to be a CSS3 property making large 
> numbers (like 35000) separate, using by choice (the property's values), the 
> comma, the dot, or a space, etc. (35,000 | 35.000 | 35 000)

Hardly. This is a matter of content, not styling, in the same sense as 
sentence punctuation is content.

> As far as I know, each language has its own punctuation mark for separating 
> numbers.

And its own punctuation for sentences and quotations, its own words and 
sentence structure, etc. Even the digits are language-dependent. So it's 
not in the realm of CSS.

Someone might say that there's the quotes property, for handling quotation 
marks in a language-dependent manner. Well, it's practically rather 
useless due to lack of support in the dominating browser. Browsers that do 
support it do that in an awful way. They require you to specify the 
quotation punctuation rules, instead of deriving them from language 
information. Besides, it was a wrong idea from the beginning. Nothing is 
really gained, as opposite to simply using correct punctuation in the 
content.

Quite apart from this, in _generating_ content (e.g., in software that 
extracts data from a database and presents it to the user, in a language 
selected by the user) it is a good idea to use localizable software that 
presents e.g. numbers in the user's preferred locale. But this is 
independent of CSS.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 22 March 2007 19:45:07 UTC