Subject: Re: [xsl] xsl:number From: Peter Flynn <peter@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 23:13:06 +0000 |
Here be dragons.
I agree with you that the specification of numbering sequences is very weak. In my view it's a classic case of "benign cultural imperialism" - the spec authors wanted to make it fully international and localisable, but since they were a bunch of Americans plus the odd expatriate European, they didn't really have much idea in detail how to go about it. This situation hasn't really changed in the 2.0 working group, and the same problem has also made it difficult to agree a spec for format-date().
Added to which, the implementors of the operating systems we have to use don't even seem to be able to agree on how to implement "locale" at the OS level.
As regards the specific questions, I think the result is that implementors have a pretty free hand to do whatever they think is right.
When I first saw it, I assumed it meant "A-Z as specified in ASCII or ISO 646RV", this being the most obvious sequence of characters known to work on all machines, despite it being entirely the wrong sequence for at least 30% of the work I do.
I think having xsl:number open to arbitrary reinterpretation on the basis of the locale would be a serious error: there would need to be some way to specify up front which sequence is to be used.
So far as I am aware, ordered lists which use alphabetic labels in non-English Latin-alphabet languages never use diacriticals (but I'm happy to be corrected). This is probably a cultural inheritance from an older period when text was written in Latin, where there was a relatively stable alphabet.
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