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

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Markus Ernst <derernst@gmx.ch> wrote:
> That's interesting, though I don't understand all of it.


> Before I read the CSS3 lists spec, as a dumb, euro-centric web author,

1/2/10
2/1/10
20,245 CUR
20.245 CUR

Once you're done learning about numbers, you can start with
punctuation, or perhaps as a euro-centric web author you're already
familiar with them? :)

> my expectation

ah. expectations, yeah, someday you'll learn not to have any :).

roughly all behaviors are bad.

If I write:

<h1> How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich</h1>
<h2> Required items </h2>
<ul>
 <li> jar of peanut butter.
 <li> jar of jelly.
 <li> two slices of bread.
 <li> spoon.
 <li> knife.
 <li> plate.
 <li> a clean flat surface ("table").
</ul>
<h2> Instructions </h2>
<ol>
 <li> Place the jars and plate on the table.
 <li> Place the spoon, knife and slices of bread on the plate.
 <li> Pick up the jar of jelly.
 <li id=openjar> Open the jar.
 <li id=putcoverdown> Place the cover on the table (top down).
 <li id=putjardown> Put the jar down on the table.
 <li> Insert the spoon into the jar and scoop out some jelly.
 <li> Take the spoon out such that the spoon's scoop is concave up.
 <li> Bring the spoon over one piece of bread.
 <li> Turn the spoon over (concave down).
 <li> Drag the spoon's scoop across a corner of the bread such that
the jelly is forced to transfer from the spoon to the bread.
 <li> Turn the spoon over (scoop concave up) and use the bottom of the
scoop to spread the jelly around the bread.
 <li> Pick up the jar of peanut butter.
 <li> Repeat steps 4 through 6.
 <li> Insert the knife into the jar at an angle and pull straight up.
...
</ol>

If the numbers in ol > li aren't rendered in the same manner as my "4"
and "6", then bad things happen. What happens if someone uses a
picture instead of "4" or "6" to highlight a certain point?

Now, someone will say "aha, html6 should provide a variable format so
that you could do <number ref=openjar>4</number>" or something. Yeah,
maybe, but it'll still mess up some of the time. And more often than
not at least one of those forms will be out of sync. Perhaps all of
them :).

The end result of most of the "intelligence" of the "required"
"expectations" for speakers who don't understand certain languages is
that things fail (badly).

I'm not trying to sound imperialistic. Yes, I'm an American and my
native language is English. But I studied Hebrew growing up and
Spanish (and ASL) in high school and I'm now living in Finland.

Mixing languages and expectations generally fails miserably.

The unicode specification essentially requests agents to "stop messing
with authored content".

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.aspx

I think that "western" numbers are* familiar to the affected parties,
just as the REVERSE SOLIDUS is familiar to Japanese and Korean
computer users. (* If they are not  familiar, they would become
familiar fairly quickly.)

>     When one of my customer’s from Korea was visiting here, I asked him if it bothered him that the backslash doesn’t appear as a backslash. It did bother him, and he believes it bothers most of his countrymen. However, he was fatalistic about it, "What can we do to change it. It’s been this way for a long time. We are used to it."

Put slightly differently. If you don't speak English, are my
instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
remotely useful to you? The answer is almost certainly "no". Assuming
you don't understand English and need to use my instructions, you'll
have to turn to a translation service (e.g. Google Translate). That
service would need to be capable of translating both numbers  and my
text into your language in order to be useful to you. And numbers are
by far the least of its problems. A quick check shows that the Spanish
translation of my text is reasonably acceptable (although my
instructions don't actually get you a peanut butter ad jelly
sandwich). Note that Google doesn't support translating into Biblical
hebrew, so it has no reason to convert the list item numbers or inline
numbers into "Hebrew" numbers (which are basically letters).

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2010 10:31:40 UTC