Periods in terms and other variables

CSL Development
1

There are two outstanding issues with periods that I think should be
fairly easy to resolve.

The first surrounds term abbreviations that include periods:

To be properly localized, terms in the locales.xml files need to
include
all periods, since certain abbreviations may or may not require
trailing
periods depending on the language used. An example would be the short
version of March, which is “Mar.” in English but, according to the
current version of locales-de-DE.xml, “März” in German (which is the
same as the long form).

The second surrounds journal abbreviations:On Jul 6, 2008, at 12:20 PM, Dan Stillman wrote:

On Feb 14, 2008, at 7:31 PM, Simon Kornblith wrote:

It’s recently been brought to my attention that some journals use
abbreviations with periods (“Exp. Brain Res.”) while others omit the
periods (“Exp Brain Res”)

It seems to me that both of these issues could be solved by allowing a
strip-period (or strip-periods) attribute on all elements, as
Dan suggested, and removing the include-period attribute. Are there
any objections to such an approach? I’m willing to go through the
existing styles to fix backwards compatibility issues.

Simon

2

But don’t each of these cases point to term specific exceptions, so
that any particular solution must be at that level (rather than text)?

E,g. …

Mai

…?

Hmm … actually, that doesn’t solve your second case, But am I right
on the first?

Bruce

PS - Simon, comment on David’s recent post?

3

If we modify the terms in the locales files to include the periods
(“Jan.” and “Feb.” but “May”), then a text-level extension like this
would be sufficient.

Simon

4

Ah, right. Duh.

Everyone: can you please comment on Simon’s proposal? It involves a
simple, but backwards-incompatible, change (e.g. you need to account
for it in your implementations).

Bruce

5

this sounds reasonable to me. elena