[whatwg] internationalization/localization

Dean Edwards dean at edwards.name
Thu Jul 8 12:34:19 PDT 2004


>>> Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> 
>>>> The second issue is localisation of data formats.
>>> 
>> fantasai wrote:
>>> Could you please explain what you mean by "localisation of data 
>>> formats"?
>> 
> Dean Edwards wrote:
>> i think ian is talking about the formatting of data for *display*.
>> so that if you selected "2nd August 2004" from a date picker, the
>> control would display "02/08/04" to european users and "08/02/04"
>> to US users. the underlying data that is submitted to the server
>> remains the same.
> 
fantasai wrote:
> That should already be taken care of by the UA's date picking widget.
>  See the note in Section 2.1: 
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#extensions0
> 
> ~fantasai
> 
ok not the best example as a date picker will quite likely do this by
default. a better example is the formatting of numbers/currencies.

a user enters this in a number field:
  ---------------
|500000         |
  ---------------

after tabbing out the number gets formatted like this for a french user:
  ---------------
|500.000,00     |
  ---------------

it gets formatted like this for a UK user:
  ---------------
|500,000.00     |
  ---------------

this is a common requirement for web applications and provides a degree
of instant validation to the user. this is especially common for
currency fields (so common in fact that i think we should have a
separate input type for currencies). a "format" attribute is likely to
be included in Web Forms 3.0 to allow the provision of formatting
patterns. ian, please correct me if i'm wrong about this.

-dean

ps. i was only kidding about the notepad popups!






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