{"id":99725,"date":"2018-09-13T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=99725"},"modified":"2019-03-13T00:29:51","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T07:29:51","slug":"20180913-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20180913-00\/?p=99725","title":{"rendered":"Raising the colon off the ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a fine typographical detail in the Windows 8 TDBN. See if you can spot it<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In the clock, it says 7∶00. <\/p>\n

Not 7:00. <\/p>\n

The colon between the hour and minutes has been raised slightly. <\/p>\n

People that care a lot about these things prevailed upon the development team to make this small refinement to the clock on the TDBN as well as the clock on the taskbar. <\/p>\n

Of course, the globalization team had their own concerns about this, because the time separator is not always a colon. And even if it is, changing the character from U+003A to U+2236 would affect right-to-left layout because U+003A is category CS (common number separator) whereas U+2236 is character ON (other neutral), which would result in “7:00” rendering incorrectly as “00:7”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
HTML<\/th>\nResult<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
<DIV DIR=\"rtl\">7:00<\/DIV><\/code><\/td>\n\n
7:00<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<DIV DIR=\"rtl\">7∶00<\/DIV><\/code><\/td>\n\n
7∶00<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Furthermore, in languages like Chinese, the U+2236 is wider than U+003A, resulting in too much white space on either side. <\/p>\n

A compromise was reached: The colon would be raised off the ground, but only if the current locale uses Latin script. The accessibility name continues to use U+003A so that screen readers will still read the time correctly. <\/p>\n

Even though TDBN disappeared in Windows 10, the refinements to the the way time is displayed still exist in the taskbar clock. <\/p>\n

Which you probably never noticed, unless you’re a typography nerd. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not something your gastroenterologist says, surprisingly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-99725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Not something your gastroenterologist says, surprisingly.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}