On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Michael[tm] Smith wrote:
Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch, 2014-02-18 23:59 +:
On Tue, 18 Feb 2014, Jonathan Watt wrote:
I wonder if it would be that bad to have a 'year' type to compliment
the 'month' and 'day' types...
This has come up a few times, but so far the use cases have not been
compelling enough. This is probably the most compelling use case, but
even here, I don't know that it's that compelling.
I would be interested in hearing more about the locales where not
using separators even for four digits is bad/suboptimal. If it wasn't
for those, I would say that just not using separators for four-digit
numbers would be an easy and effective solution.
The following info seems relevant -
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/comma.html#numbers
Most authorities, including The Associated Press Stylebook and The Chicago
Manual of Style, recommend a comma after the first digit of a four-digit
number. The exceptions include years, page numbers, and street addresses.
To me that appears to be a strong argument that formatting of years is
in fact clearly an exception, and that's compelling enough to warrant
having a type for them separate from the normal number type (in which
four-digit numbers would instead have a separator, to follow existing
longstanding conventions).
Interesting.
For street addresses, we are moving in the direction of larger fields not
smaller fields, so I'm not too worried about that use case. (I do know one
form that looks just for a street address number, but presumably it has to
handle non-numeric data anyway, as in 23A.)
If that left just page numbers, I'd probably ignore it, since the use
cases are pretty limited there. But years are clearly a major use case.
Doing further research along these lines, it seems that it's specifically
page numbers and years _that are four digits long_ that are at issue, when
it comes to English:
| MLA style is to use a comma in four-digit numbers except in page
| numbers, line numbers, addresses, and years, unless the year has more
| than four digits, such as 10,000 BCE.
-- http://www.esc.edu/online-writing-center/resources/punctuation/commas/
Though some people say that applies to more than just years and page
numbers:
| Use commas to separate groups of 3 numbers in numbers of 5 digits or
| more unless decimals are used. The comma in a 4-digit number may be
| omitted.
-- http://mtdesk.com/Numbers
However, in other languages, as Karl showed, the pattern is different.
As I see it, we have two possible paths:
1. We consider this a stylistic issue, and we add something to CSS to make
it possible to control the formatting of numbers in input type=number.
Then, someone doing a page-number control in English can use CSS to make
it not include commas in four-digit numbers but include numbers otherwise,
and so forth.
2. We consider this a semantic issue, and we add one or more new input
types to handle the new smenatics. For example, we add type=year and
type=page-number.
We can also follow a combinations of both, providing a new control for
the cases that need more than just style, and providing style for the
cases that are just presentational.
On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
The point is that year numbers aren't really numbers in a normal
sense, any more than car plate numbers, credit card numbers, product
numbers, or social security numbers are. Surely they can be regarded as
numbers, but so can car plate numbers and the others.
On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Smylers wrote:
Except that years do actually form a sequence, and it's possible to
perform maths on them; for instances, subtracting one year from another
yields a duration, which is a meaningful quantity, whereas subtracting a
couple of credit card numbers is completely useless.
On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
Mathematically, you are right, but input types aren't based on general
properties of quantities but on practical classification of input data.
All the examples I gave, including year numbers, are normally input by
typing the digits - in contrast with, say, using a color picker, a data
picker, or a slider.
Your annual income, when enterested into an electronic tax form, is
usually input by typing the digits, but it's definitely a number. I
think the only way, in western locales, that years differ from other
numbers is with respect to formatting, and that's not unique to years, as
Mike pointed out (c.f. page numbers).
On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Smylers wrote:
There are situations where up/down arrows makes sense on years. For
instance, a chart of various baby names could have a box for the year
currently being displayed, and it's handy to be able to nudge that along
by a year at a time to see it change, without having to manually retype
the year. Or when displaying one year's tax return, with the ability to
display other
