The virtue of using CSS <span> gaps is the entire significand can be copied and pasted into applications like Excel, where they will be automatically treated as numbers without the need to hand-delete non- breaking spaces, which are unique and distinct characters. To see the difference in action, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Greg_L#Val
Greg
On Feb 1, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:39 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
I would rather have an application-specific number formatting function, rather than a character-counting function. It could be similar to PHP's number_format(). Wikitext is a terrible programming language, slow to execute and hard to understand. It's much better to write in PHP.
Note that {{val}} uses at least a few strange HTML-specific hacks, like using CSS instead of space characters to create spaces between the digit groups (for copy-paste purposes). Something that would work like {{val}} would be considerably different from number_format().
_______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l