Re: SI prefixes with "accepted" units, others

Hi Neil, all,

kilo-hours is indeed a sensible unit and has the symbol "khrs".

I see 32 examples of SI Unit symbols with leading "k" in wiktionary, here:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Symbols_for_SI_units&pagefrom=HG%0Ahg#mw-pages

I suspect there is no "kh" in SI, but "kH" is a "kilohenry" and "kHz" is a
"kilohertz".

As one idea:
If one anticipates parsing collisions, a system could support the most
common unit symbols activating via the ":unit" Intent property,
but require an explicit :si add-on property to 'intent=":si:unit"', to
activate the full range of SI possibilities (and safely ignore non-SI
conflicts).

Another idea would be to require rare/unsupported SI units to carry an
explicit intent concept, as with intent="kilohour:unit".

Lastly, I suspect this kind of discussion would be better redirected into
an open MathCAT issue, rather than a closed w3c/mathml issue.

Greetings,
Deyan


On Mon, Nov 11, 2024 at 3:31 AM Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> I've started work on making MathCAT handle ":units" and wonder how many of
> the "accepted" units (and others?) should or should not take SI prefixes
> (kilo, penta, ...). The units that we came up with are listed in issue
> #475 <https://github.com/w3c/mathml/issues/475>.
>
> For example, does "kh" for "kilo-hour" make any sense? "kt" for
> "kilo-tonne"? "kl" for "kilo-liter" does make sense though ("liter", or for
> the British "litre", is not a base unit, it is an accepted unit).
>
> Make sure to look at the "other" category at the bottom. Some of them such
> as bytes and calories take a prefix.
>
> Thanks for any guidance you can provide. For posterity, adding your
> thoughts to the issue would be best, but feel free to reply to this email
> if that is much easier for you.
>
>     Neil
>
>