From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 13:58:28 CDT
> > Moreover, you would never label a document for a
> > number format in order to determine how automated-formatting
> > of numbers should be done on the receiving system.
>
> You would not label it to determine formatting on the receiving
system, but
> to determine interpretation (parsing) of formatted values in the
received
> data. You need to know what the convention is to interpret the number
> 123.456 or the date 02/03/04.
But as I pointed out earlier, you cannot know for certain how to
interpret it unless you know how it was generated; and if it was entered
manually by a human, you need to know what they were thinking. A locale
ID cannot tell you that. A locale ID is useful only if the string that's
received was generated automatically on the originating system (and you
know that to be the case), but I'm guessing that most of the time when
that actually happens, that string is going to be an isolated element
within a data structure.
It is the case that in a significant number of situations the language
tag of content will include a region ID, and if I encounter a formatted
number or date string in the content, I can use that to guess what the
correct interpretation should be. But I'm not sure I'd want to build a
system for processing business transactions on such assumptions.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
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