Re: Element for Numbers

> and Binary Multiples each have their own prefixes and definitions.  2^20 has
> the symbol Mi, which means mebi (not mega).

I've never seen that one before.  However it does help to point out the
unworkability of this proposal as popular and marketing usage, and,
unfortunately, even some usage from people who ought to be expected to
know better, is to write milli-bits (mb - 1E-3 bits) when they mean
mega bytes (MB - 2^20 * 8 bits) of RAM.  Also how many people know
that a RAM MB is not the same as a hard disk MB.  Generally, unless you
are a practicing engineer, you are unlikely to specify units correctly,
even in the unlikely event that you can be convinced to volunteer markup
of numbers.

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

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2002 01:50:14 UTC