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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

> <html lange="en">

s/lange/lang/

> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">

Don’t need the “.0”. In fact, the atrocious incomplete spec of this stuff <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-viewport-1/> specifies using strtod to parse the number, which is locale dependent, so in theory on a locale that uses a different decimal separator (e.g. French), the “.0” will be ignored.

I have yet to test whether <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.5"> misbehaves (parsing as 1 instead of 1½) with LC_NUMERIC=fr_FR.UTF-8 on any user agents.

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Wow. This reminds me of Google Sheets formulas, where function parameters are separated with , or ; depending on locale.

Same as Excel and LibreOffice surely?

Yes

The behaviour predates Google Sheets and likely comes from Excel (whose behavior Sheets emulate/reverse engineer in many places). And I wouldn't be surprised if Excel got it from Lotus.

Not to mention the functions are also translated to the other language. I think both these are the fault of Excel to be honest. I had this problem long before Google came around.

And it's really irritating when you have the computer read something out to you that contains numbers. 53.1 km reads like you expect but 53,1 km becomes "fifty-three (long pause) one kilometer".

> Not to mention the functions are also translated to the other language.

This makes a lot of sense when you recognize that Excel formulas, unlike proper programming languages, aren't necessarily written by people with a sufficient grasp of the English language, especially when it comes to more abstract mathematical concepts, which aren't taught in secondary English language classes at school, but it in their native language mathematics classes.

Oh, good to know that it depends on locale, I always wondered about that behavior!

Given that world is about evenly split on the decimal separator [0] (and correspondingly on the thousands grouping separator), it’s hard to avoid. You could standardize on “;” as the argument separator, but “1,000” would still remain ambiguous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...

Try Apple Numbers, where even function names are translated and you can’t copy & paste without an error if your locale is, say, German.

aha, in Microsoft Excel they translate even the shortcuts. The Brazilian version Ctrl-s is "Underline" instead of "Save". Every sheet of mine ends with a lot of underlined cells :-)

Not sure if this still is the case, but Excel used to fail to open CSV files correctly if the locale used another list separator than ',' – for example ';'.

I’m happy to report it still fails and causes me great pain.

Reall? Libreoffice at least has a File > Open menu that allows you to specify the separator and other CSV stuff, like the quote character

Excel has that too. But you can't just double-click a CSV file to open it.

You have to be inside Excel and use the data import tools. You cannot double click to open, it outs everything in one cell…

Sometimes you double click and it opens everything just fine and silently corrupts and changes and drops data without warning or notification and gives you no way to prevent it.

The day I found that Intellij has a built in CSV tabular editor and viewer was the best day.

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