Re: Element for Numbers

David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>:
>
> However it does help to point out the
> unworkability of this proposal as popular and marketing usage, and,


It's easy to point out the unworkability of HTML as popular and marketing
usage for everything else than a Flash container and link list to PDF files.
:(

> Also how many people know
> that a RAM MB is not the same as a hard disk MB.

They are the same, but marketing MB is not the same as technical MB.
Imagine:

| This harddisk DW0H60 has a capacity of <nr value="64424509440" unit="B"
| title="Formatting reduces theoretically available space.">64.4 GB</nr>.

A UA would provide some indication that there's additional information to
"64.4 GB" and make it accessible to the user in an appropriate form.

> Generally, unless you
> are a practicing engineer, you are unlikely to specify units correctly,

That's not true from my perspective. Marketing people tend to ignore case
rules whenever they feel like it and in English there are abnormal forms
(kph instead of km/h), but there are also HTML editors that provide a list
of allowed attribute values as well as some that at least check them for
validity.

> even in the unlikely event that you can be convinced to volunteer markup
> of numbers.

"volunteer markup" -- I wish there were people actually doing that apart
from "geeks" and some engineers (who quickly demand Docbook functionality),
but if you listened to the common "web designer", you had to drop all
elements but table, tr, td, img, br, nobr, b, i, u, h1-3 (Why is h1 smaller
than h6? It has a lower value!!!1), font, div, script, meta, blink, marquee,
embed, frame, frameset and probably a, and rename blockquote to indent.

> I think the right place for this sort of markup is in application specific
> namespaces, specified using XML schemas.

I think that's overkill.

> Trying to use this with XHTML will produce much worse conformance
> than that for using alt attributes correctly, for referring to elements
> and attributes rather than tags, and for using HTML Hn elements
> appropriately.

Since when are stupid authors a counter argument? I've never seen tbody,
acronym etc. in a commercial site either.

Christoph Päper

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2002 05:59:46 UTC