Re: [css3-lists] Proposal for a generic numeric list-style-type

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sometimes, yes.  Often, it seems, not.  Empirically, the Hebrew,
> Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias all use decimal numbers for
> <ol>, even though they all have native numbering systems too supported
> in CSS, and there are certainly admins on all of those wikis who would
> know how to change it.

The reason that Hebrew numbering wouldn't be used by wikipedia for
general lists is quite simple, as explained by:
http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/hebrew-numbers.html
<blockquote>
Most Hebrew text today uses European digits (0, 1, 2, 3...9) to
represent numbers.
However, religious or biblical text, and calendars in Hebrew will use
the traditional
form which uses Hebrew letters as numeric values.
</blockquote>

> The Persian Wikipedia uses list-style-type:
> persian for <ol>, however.  Do any browsers ship different
> list-style-types for different language editions?

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you mean. For Mozilla iirc we
had slightly different rules for how numbers behaved in certain
contexts -- this related to hindi/arabic. From memory, the preference
for Arabic was different for Persian than other Arabic localized
builds.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries#Bidi.
bidi.numeral

> Any other data we have?

> I suspect it's not going to be so straightforward to figure out which
> languages need native list markers and which don't.  My experience
> suggests that at least for some languages, whatever you choose, some
> users will think native numerals feel weird ("All other websites use
> Arabic numerals, it feels wrong for a website to use native") and some
> will think Arabic numerals are wrong ("All books use native numerals,
> it's completely standard").
>
> My guess is that this isn't something we want hardcoded in a spec.
> Individual websites will have to listen to their specific users.  It's
> really not such a big authoring burden.

Specing things for magic numbers (hebrew 15/16) is useful, deciding
which numbering system to use is probably not. It turns out that there
are too many variations.

> I'd think not much.  It should be no worse than having a list of
> selectors like ol:lang(fa) { list-style-type: persian }, although it
> might be harder to implement.  "Massive comparisons" like this are
> awfully efficient using things like, say, hash tables -- the
> comparison itself would be negligible compared to the type it would
> take to lay out, I imagine.  (But current implementations might not
> have the language info handy at this point in the code, I don't know.)

Received on Monday, 17 May 2010 21:43:59 UTC