- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:14:58 -0500
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 12:58 AM, Max Romantschuk<max at romantschuk.fi> wrote: > Hi Everyone, > > I've been off the list for quite some time, so bear with me if I missed > something searching the archives. > > I've been looking at the meter element, which specifically states that > "There is no explicit way to specify units in the meter element, but the > units may be specified in the title attribute in free-form text." > > Having used the web for the past 15 years I've always felt that it's a shame > when you run into a page with a set of measurements and those can't be > interpreted automatically in a sensible fashion. Especially with the fact > that there are both imperial and metric units still around in this day and > age. > > An backwards compatible inline element to specify a quantity would be rather > trivial: > > <quantity unit="cm">12 cm</quantity> > <quantity unit="kg">2 kg</quantity> > > With this implementation a number inside the quantity element would be > interpreted as the numerical value of the unit. Other characters would be > ignored. That way old browsers would simply ignore the unknown tag, whereas > a browser aware of this tag could provide DOM hooks for things like > implementing a browser extension to convert between metric and imperial > units. > > Food for thought. Opinions, anyone? It would be good if @unit could be omitted and parsed from the content as well in simple cases. In both of the examples you provide, it would be trivial. /(\d+)\s*([a-zA-Z]*)/ would capture the quantity and the unit in most cases. I think a stronger case would be to provide automatic conversions to one's preferred quantitative units, as has been discussed as a possible use for <time>. Are there stronger use-cases for this than just auto-conversion, though? <time>, frex, allows for easy machine-scraping of time/date data for adding things to calenders. ~TJ
Received on Tuesday, 11 August 2009 06:14:58 UTC