Re: controlling digits substitution in IE/FF (Arabic/Hindi/Decimal)

David Woolley wrote:
> Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
>> In some areas of the world, Hindi digits are used. In other areas, Arabic
>> digits are used. When someone looks at a web page in Arabic, he could be
> 
> There are no specifically Hindi digits.  Each Indic script (e.g. 
> including Thai) tends to have its own digits.  Hindi is written in 
> Devanagari script, but Marathi is also written in that script.
> 
> Also, in English, "Arabic numerals" is commonly used to refer to 
> distinction between a place value system with a zero and the old Roman 
> numeral system, not to to the actual Arabic glyphs.
> 
>> expected to see the digits he is used to.
>>
>> The viewer's preference may be independent of the preference of the
>> originator of the web page.
> 
> That requires semantic mark up for numbers.  In particular, for Chinese, 
>  serial numbers, and even things like bus route numbers, are represented 
> as a string of digits, whereas numerical numbers have multipliers 
> embedded.  In English, this happens when speaking numbers, but not when 
> writing them.  (Note that, in real life, European style numbers are used 
> in China.)
> 
> It would make sense for telephone numbers to be presented right to left 
> in Arabic, even though numeric numbers have their most significant digit 
> on the right.  I don't know the actual situation.

That should have been "most significant digit on the left", i.e. last, 
rather than first (as in European and Chinese).

-- 
David Woolley
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Received on Tuesday, 2 June 2009 07:30:13 UTC