- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:16:13 -0700
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch> wrote: >> 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. Seems like these two arguments can be made against <meter> and <dialog> respectively. Especially <dialog> I don't understand how anyone is helped by having it marked up. Last time I asked it sounded like it was added to put an end to a perma-thread regarding how to properly mark up dialogs, started by some off-hand comment in the HTML4 spec. However I was under the impression that you had tried to avoid using that (ending permathreads) as a reason for adding something to the spec. / Jonas
Received on Friday, 28 August 2009 01:16:13 UTC