From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 09:40:03 CDT
> Well, it is true that what I really search for is not *exactly* the
> formatting locale, but rather another wider information, which would
be the
> mind setting of the writer.
Precisely. The locale info only tells you how a number would have been
formatted by the author's system, not what the author in fact did. When
you receive a document, being told what the system would have done
doesn't tell you anything useful. Not unless the document you receive
was generated by the system -- and I'm guessing that in many such
situations what's exchanged isn't a document per se but data structures
in which numbers are in some pre-defined representation not formatted
for the user.
I'm not saying that there is never a need to exchange locale-setting
info. Only that I don't think it's appropriate in general to tag
documents (by which I don't mean an accounting spreadsheet or an
order-entry record) for things like number formatting, and so such info
should not be included in attributes like xml:lang.
> I have another example, but I cannot expose it here publicly, it is
related
> to some proprietary software.
If something is going on internal to proprietary software, then there
are no rules. This is only about public interchange.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 13 2004 - 09:41:15 CDT