Style for phone numbers on a web site?

Question

When creating a web site that contains phone numbers, which style of formatting the numbers do you prefer? Why?
[phone]
OR
555-555-1212
OR
555.555.1212
OR
other

Answer 1

[phone]

Answer 2

Depending on what types of numbers the site will contain...if only numbers in North America I would have to say:
[phone]
This is a very common layout for phone numbers and most people would be familiar with this format.

If the website were hosting International nubmers as well I would either go with:
555-555-1212
or
555 555 1212

reasoning is that if the number were international the digits will appear in an unfamiliar format to North Americans due to the Country Code used for internation numbers so a number would look like

[phone]
or
[phone]
I would try to stay away from this second format though since not all international numbers come in the common xxx xxx xxxx format. A number from the UK could be:
+44 xxxx xxx xxx
which appears backwards compared to the other formats.

Answer 3

555-555-1212

Answer 4

the one with the - in between like
that 555-555-1212

Answer 5

[phone]

Answer 6

The handy thing about the dot style is that, if the line is too long and the paragraph ends up splitting, then the hyphen won't be treated as the "middle" of a word - the dots will keep the phone number "intact" as one string. The dot format is "European" style and is being adopted by several-to-many webmasters.

Answer 7

first off is that your real phone number? I like the last one. And what kind of a question is that anyways.

sarah

Answer 8

555.555.1212 is the universally understood presentation.