Re: Element for Numbers

Peter Foti (PeterF) <PeterF@SystolicNetworks.com>:
> Christoph Päper Wrote:
>
> If I had to choose, I would vote for "unit".

Fine with me.

> The difference between 2^20 and 10^3 has to be taken into consideration in
> your numbering system,

Probably, but *I* am not going to try to include something I heard first of
yesterday.

> It seems as though aural browsers are the primary benefactor from this
> system.

The most obvious uses apply to them, yes. Which user of a visual UA benefits
from cite, em and var, which look the same in most browsers' default
rendering (i.e. italic)?

> How would you propose a visual UA makes the determination
> of when to replace the data and when not to?

Hm, leave it to implementors? Or author stylesheets.

> Again, I think that aural browsers are the primary
> benefactor (and possibly the ONLY benefactor) in this proposal.

Definitely not the only ones. Visual UAs should make the information
available somehow and may apply a default style to text marked up with nr
(or whatever it's called).

>> · combine value and unit,
>
> And what is the benefit of combining the value and unit?

E.g. nr {white-space: nowrap; word-spacing: -0.33ex}

>> · remove ambiguities (How much is one ton? 1000kg or 2000lbs?),
>
> Removing ambiguities... I assume you mean through a tooltip?

Possible, but that's not the only option. Compare to the title attribute,
it's mostly rendered as tooltip, but that's not required.

> the user is presented with "1 ton", and the tool tip says "2000lbs"

lbs wouldn't be allowed as unit, the UA should provide a conversion to a
value the user is used to.

> I find the idea of a tool tip to be a good one
> that could perhaps be applied to HTML as a separate item.

The title attribute already does that mostly, but doesn't provide
information about the text it contains.

Christoph Päper

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2002 15:27:36 UTC