Re: Currency Element Suggestion

> A suggestion for a element that designates a currency amount.
> I was imagining this INLINE element working something like this:

Amongst other things there will be legal issues.  You will find the 
currency conversion sites generally have a disclaimer that they should 
not be used for legal purposes.  Also, do you convert at the consumer 
buy price, consumer sell price, a commercial price, etc.

There are also commercial issues: how do you provide revenue to the 
conversion site if they cannot send adverts along with the rate?

> 
> <p>The company's stock sold for a <currency value="5.26"
> date="16/11/2004" origin="US" localize comma paren /> per share.</p>

There are already standard three character currency codes, e.g. USD, 
GBP, CNY.  "US" is not one of them.  Dates should be in ISO format, i.e. 
2004-11-16.

An element like this should never be empty; the content should be the 
value in a format that will make sense to someone without the very 
latest browser.

> required (determining if it is to be included in MM/DD/YYYY format or
> DD/MM/YYYY format).

Neither of these represent valid standards for W3C formats.  See above.

> COMMA: This determines if commas should be used in displaying the
> formatted version of the VALUE. If omitted, commas are NOT used.

Commas are used as the decimal separator in most of continental Europe!
> 
> PAREN: For accountant format, if the PAREN attribute is present, a
> negative VALUE will be displayed with encapsulating parentheses. If
> omitted, a negative value will be displayed with a preceding hyphen.

Strictly speaking parentheses means unfavourable, rather than negative. 
  There are several other conventions, e.g. suffix CR or DR.  If you are 
going to specify a character for a minus sign, it should probably be U+2212.


-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Thursday, 9 August 2007 19:46:05 UTC