> > 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
