> Well, it is true that what I really search for is not *exactly* the > formatting locale, but rather another wider information, which would be the > mind setting of the writer.
Precisely. The locale info only tells you how a number would have been formatted by the author's system, not what the author in fact did. When you receive a document, being told what the system would have done doesn't tell you anything useful. Not unless the document you receive was generated by the system -- and I'm guessing that in many such situations what's exchanged isn't a document per se but data structures in which numbers are in some pre-defined representation not formatted for the user. I'm not saying that there is never a need to exchange locale-setting info. Only that I don't think it's appropriate in general to tag documents (by which I don't mean an accounting spreadsheet or an order-entry record) for things like number formatting, and so such info should not be included in attributes like xml:lang. > I have another example, but I cannot expose it here publicly, it is related > to some proprietary software. If something is going on internal to proprietary software, then there are no rules. This is only about public interchange. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
