by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/05/12 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/05/12/10163685.aspx
Something very "Beavis and Butthead-esque" about today's blog....
Thinking about the time after I wrote Suddenly, in a bit more time than a blink of an eye, "standards support" becomes "less i18n support".
Now regular reader John Cowan commented to that blog:
So what happens when there is a U+206E in the text that IE is rendering? Does it have effect, and if so, what effect?
Perhaps unintentionally he gave me the inspiration for today's entirely inappropriate blog that you are reading!
Looking at the blog, it was talking about the fact that Internet Explorer had decided to for the sake of standards pre-emptively break the behavior of many keyboards and locales and users met with many yawns.
I mean, no one wanted to go fight Internet Explorer, they're just too big to really take on, especially on matters related to standards support.
When you get right down to it, no one had the nerve.
No one had the guts.
And pardon the expression but no one had the nads to stand up and insist that the browser behavior be changed to do things the way it used to.
Which brings us back to John's comment.
Because as it turns out, when you insert U+206e, aka NATIONAL DIGIT SHAPES, in front of the text, it will override even an IE8 or IE9 tag in text like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" >
</head>
<body>
<p>0123456789</p>
</body>
</html>
and it will put in the National digits, overriding the new IE behavior to match the LOCALE_SNATIVEDIGITS of the user's default locale.
Now the nickname of U+206e (NATIONAL DIGITS SHAPES) is NADS.
So if you want to show IE that you have the NADS to stand up to this change, you can get native digit shapes back again.... :-)
For more information on this character and digit shape issues like this, you can look at the Digit Shapes topic in MSDN.
Or you can ask me for this keyboard that will leave no doubt about whether you have the NADS....
Richard on 12 May 2011 10:58 AM:
Great - now I can't stop thinking about a bunch of cheerleaders chanting "Go NADS!"
Alex Cohn on 12 May 2011 12:27 PM:
I bless the idea to discontinue automatic substitution of digit shapes in browser. If a customer so much prefers Indic digits, they will most likely need the whole page translated to Arabic. Luckily, nowadays such Web technlogies are available. Unfortunately, Microsoft Translator (so nicely integrated on this page) does not reshape digits.
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