Re: Few comments

Thank you for your reply, Curt.
I still have a doubt about the localization issue, anyway. You said:

"Definitely, wanted to avoid the case of not being able to
determine (or worse guessing) whether a comma was a digit separator or a
decimal point."

I understand your point. However I am wondering the following. Let us
suppose that you defined a language for legal documents which states that
numbers are xsd:decimal and dates are in user-defined typical US format
(MM/DD/YY). An Italian company publishes in its site a contract for web
ordering of products. The contract uses that language and contains a price
EUR 8.500 and a date 03/04/01. For that company, the price is eight
thousand and five hundreds euros, and the date is April 3rd, 2001, but for
an American customer price is eight euros and fifty cents, and date is
March 4th, 2001. It would be very useful if the browser would be able to
automatically convert those value to the current locale, that is the locale
of customer. This is possible anyway, only if the webmaster specified in
the document the locale in which those values had been written.

If you fix the format of decimal in XML Schema, you force me to use US-like
format in Italian pages, or not use your language at all. That is, instread
of

<product partNumber="AS45">
  <description>Ink-jet Printer AS45</description>
  <price currency="EUR">1200.00</price>
</product>

which contains a US-form price, I will have to use

<product partNumber="AS45">
  <description>Ink-jet Printer AS45</description>
  1200,00 EUR
</product>

hoping that product content is defined as mixed. I woul prefer

<product partNumber="AS45">
  <description>Ink-jet Printer AS45</description>
  <price currency="EUR" xsi:locale="IT-it">1200,00</price>
</product>

As you can see, there is no need to change the meaning of decimal, but
rather adding a new attribute for XML languages, and add in xsd:complexType
a new property called xsd:localisable or something like that:

<xsd:element name="price">
  <xsd:complexType base="xsd:decimal" derivedBy="xsd:extension"
localisable="true">
      <xsd:attribute name="currency" type="IsoCurrencyCodes" />
  </xsd:complexType>
</xsd:element>

Dr. Dario de Judicibus - IBM Global Services
EMEA Knowledge Management Consulting Group

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Received on Thursday, 27 April 2000 06:36:06 UTC