[whatwg] Decimal comma in numeric input
Jukka K. Korpela
jkorpela at cs.tut.fi
Thu Apr 14 02:05:08 PDT 2011
I was surprised at seeing that the Finnish-language version of Google Chrome
11 beta accepts a number with a comma, such as "4,2", in <input
type="number">. It silently converts the comma to a full stop, "4.2".
This looked like a useful feature at first sight, as decimal comma is
standard in Finnish as in most human languages. But this seems to violate
the rules, since <input type="number"> is defined as allowing a "valid
floating point number" (the definition of which clearly allows FULL STOP as
the only decimal separator) only and, moreover, there is prescribed error
processing: an error shall be returned, and the value sanitization algorithm
shall set the value to the empty string; ref.:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/number-state.html#number-state
So the Google Chrome implementation is in error here, right?
On the other hand, would it be useful to _allow_ localization so that a
browser _may_ interpret a comma as a decimal separator? Perhaps assuming the
localization settings of the browser or the underlying system specify comma
as decimals separator, or perhaps independently of that.
Google Chrome seems to take the localization so far that if I specify
value="4.2", it gets displayed as "4,2", and if I type "5.5" in the field,
it gets automatically converted to "5,5" in the visible rendering - though
in DOM and in the submitted form data, it's "5.5".
Things get risky, because if the user then enters "1.500" (which corresponds
to the old way of writing one thousand five hundred in digits in Finnish, a
notation still used to some extent and still official in some other
languages) in <input type="number"> field, it gets accepted and sent as
"1.500" (one and a half), if the value restrictions allow it - though the
visual rendering is automatically changed to "1,5".
I guess the big question is: Should localization issues be concerned in the
specification of <input type="number">? If not, the usefulness of the
construct is limited, since in many contexts it is unacceptable to require
that users input and see numbers in a format that does not correspond to
conventions that are normal for their language and culture.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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