Purpose of the comma, semicolon and colon terms?

[Omikhleia]

Greetings,

Locales files have a provision for localized comma, semicolon and colon, e.g.

    <term name="colon">:</term>
    <term name="comma">,</term>
    <term name="semicolon">;</term>

Working on my own CSL implementation and reading the 1.0.2 specification, it's not clear what the intent was, though.

My initial naive "guess" was that it could be used when delimiters or affixes contain a :, ; or , in order to replace them with the "localized" variant...

I even thought that it was actually pretty clever -- So I could use, say, the fr-FR French locale (which has a non-breaking space as it should, more or less,[^1] before the colon and semicolon terms) with any (unmodified) style and get it typographically right...

But then I dabbled into the chicago-author-date-fr.csl style, and it does have the non-breaking space in all concerned delimiters and affixes... So with my initial "naive" guess was wrong (and I'd get two of these non-breaking spaces). Ok, I can skip doing any replacements on the delimiters and affixes, but:

• Then I'd need any style to have a French variant, just for those?
• And the colon/semicolon/comma terms in locales serve no real purpose?

I think the specification and the expectation needs to be clarified.

[^1]: Well, using a   is not "that" correct typographically speaking... But it's somehow acceptable and I am not going to enter that debate here. (Hint for French readers who know their good typography: it's non-breakable, indeed, but variable? fixed? the same in all cases?)