Re: Using the Unicode ellipsis (…) instead of three periods

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-12-04 at 09:51 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
>> >
>> > Is this really the right thing to do. Even the Microsoft page
>> > uses the rather wishy-washy "Consider using the ratio symbol",
>> > as if they're not quite sure this is a good idea. It does look
>> > nicer, but it's semantically wrong. A time is not a ratio. How
>> > does Orca read it?
>>
>> I don't really have an answer to the philosophical question of what a
>> 'ratio' really is and whether
>> 9-colon-49 is any more correct than 9-ratio-49 when it comes to
>> representing time.
>>
>> But I can say that Orca reads the one like the other: "nine fortynine".
>
> Perhaps more importantly, the ratio character behaves differently in RtL
> locales than the colon character does. See:
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/02/09/10265712.aspx
>
> If I write 09:53 with a colon, it’ll remain left-to-right in RtL locales
> because the colon is a Unicode number separator. If I write 09∶53 with a
> ratio character, it’ll appear as 53∶09 in RtL locales. (Tested in
> gedit.)
>
> Is this the behaviour we want?

I'd say its up to the translators of each locale to say what format is
most appropriate for their language. Date and time formats are
translatable for a reason...