- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:30:23 +0000 (UTC)
On Mon, 17 Aug 2009, Max Romantschuk wrote: > Ian Hickson wrote: > > I don't really understand the use case here. What problem would this be > > solving? What do we have to demonstrate that this problem matters? > > It might well be that there is no problem. Ok. Then I recommend we punt this to the next version. > From a practical perspective it would be nice to have an unambiguous way > to mark up numerical constants in a document and thus allow a > straightforward way of doing conversions. > > Personally, the obvious use case for me is recipes. Even a relatively > simple one requires a lot of manual calculation to convert cups, pounds > and ounces into deciliters and grams. While some sites supply conversion > tools for this providing the semantic information straight in the markup > would allow conversions for any document. > > With the large majority of humanity doing cooking one could argue that > this would be genuinely useful. Then again, it's quite possible no one > would ever use this, and it would just end up cluttering the spec. I can't imagine really seeing enough sites using this to make it worth it, but maybe our experience with <time> will show this kind of thing is used a lot. On Wed, 19 Aug 2009, Jeremy Keith wrote: > > The problem statement on the microformats wiki page reads: > > "Measures (e.g. weights, sizes, temperatures) occur frequently on the > Web, they are constituted of a value a unit-measure and, in scientific > and technical contexts, an experimental uncertainty. These 3 elements > should be marked-up consistently across websites so that they can be > easily identified and acted upon (export, compute, convert) in > collaborative distributed applications. > > Unit-measures differ from locale to locale (e.g. Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, > pound versus Kilogram), making comparison and matching of offerings > difficult. > > The measurement microformat will enable unambiguous description of > physical quantities and thus provide a solid ground for data sharing and > automation in many areas." This is begging the question. Just because a pattern occurs a lot doesn't mean that it should be marked up. But I guess if the microformat is successful, we'll have the data we need for the next version of the spec. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 27 August 2009 17:30:23 UTC