Because you brought up ordinals, I would just like to add that I think Rintze is absolutely right in that including the gender support for locales will not lead to issues for CSL 1.0 processor processing 1.0 locales. Furthermore, it is not difficult for 1.0.1 processors to handle 1.0 locales; judging from some of the citeproc-tests I believe that the proposal is implemented in citeproc-js already? I definitely and to implement gender support for some of the tests to pass.
However, there was another issue I had to address in citeproc-ruby. For illustrations purposes, you can take a look at the test cases here:
https://github.com/inukshuk/citeproc-ruby/blob/master/spec/csl/locale_spec.rb
The relevant tests are for ‘#ordinalize’, lines 85 through 159. As you can see on lines 92 and 100, I would expect 3 to become 3rd, 13 to become 13th, 23 to become 23rd. This does not work with CSL 1.0 because I can only specify the ordinals 1-4 (13 would probably become 13rd here). What’s more, I would expect that in different languages all kinds of exceptions are possible which lead to similar problems.
My implementation currently addresses this as follows:
Given a a number X to ordinalize, I check the locales, following the normal prioritization, for a definition of X; if X is not defined, the process is repeated for Y = X % mod where mod currently starts at 100 and is divided by 10 in every consecutive step. Therefore, to ordinalize 1155 I would try to look up the following terms until there is a match:
ordinal-1155
ordinal-55
ordinal-05
ordinal-00
To ordinalize 113 the look-up would be for:
ordinal-113
ordinal-13
ordinal-03
ordinal-00
So, as you can see, for English, I would have to define the following minimal set of ordinals to cover all cases (that I can think of right now):
ordinal-00 = 'th’
ordinal-01 = 'st’
ordinal-02 = 'nd’
ordinal-03 = 'rd’
ordinal-11 = 'th’
ordinal-12 = 'th’
ordinal-13 = ‘th’
In the two examples above 1155 becomes 1155th and 113 becomes 113th, whereas using a CSL 1.0 locale the algorithm would return 1155th and 113rd which is wrong but consistent, I think, with CSL 1.0 expectations. That is to say, allowing locales to define any number as an ordinal term should not alter the behaviour of CSL 1.0 processors at all; furthermore, the results of a processor using the above algorithm when using 1.0 locales is consistent with current implementations, too.
One possible problem with this approach is that ordinal-00 is implicitly treated as the default ordinal; given that 0 itself is likely to occur less frequently than 4 (which acts like a default now) this is perhaps even an improvement, but given a language that has a zero ordinal ending which is not suitable as a default this quickly becomes problematic. Therefore, we could add an explicit default ordinal-xx instead of the implicit ordinal-00.
Sylvester