[uf-discuss] hReview for Stocks

[John Panzer]

Tantek Çelik wrote:

 >I could however see using abbr to remove the name of the
 >market/trading-floor, since common stock discussions usually omit that
 >(since it is often implied by the ticker), and only provide the ticker
 >symbol: e.g. <abbr title="NasdaqNM:MSFT">MSFT</abbr>
 >

Yep, in the usages I've seen, people tend to use either the name or the
individual ticker symbol interchangeably in text.  That is, the
difference between "Buy Time Warner now!" and "Buy TWX now!" seems to be 
mostly a matter of style; human readers figure out from context what's 
being said.  In either case they're using an abbreviation.

I also see usages similar to the ones below when the ticker symbol is 
actually mentioned along with the company name.  These usages would let 
us just mark up the human readable content:

   Buy Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) now!
   Shares of Tractor Supply (TSCO:Nasdaq - commentary - research -
Cramer's Take)
   I made my top pick Quality Systems (Nasdaq: QSII)

The last two are copied and pasted from Yahoo! and Fool.com,
respectively.

Note the amusing lack of consistency in the ordering of
exchange and ticker symbol in the last two.  If we actually want to be 
able to simply mark these up semantically, without imposing changes on 
the human readable text, I think we need two elements.  For example, 
class="exchange" and class="ticker".  And that's the right
way to do it.  But in the "Buy TWX now!" case we still need abbr.

All of this seems to indicate that we do need a "stock symbol 
microformat" in order to be able to (a) mark all of this up properly 
while (b) embedding it as a reviewable thing inside hReview or as 
additional data inside an hCard representing a business.

We've been trying hard not to invent new microformats but it sure looks 
like it's time to go to the Wiki page.  Here's the logical structure I 
think is needed:

ticker
   symbol (required)
   exchange (required)
   (possibly) country (definitely not required)

All of which can be marked up using abbr if necessary.

OK, off to http://microformats.org/wiki/stock-symbol-examples.

-- 
John Panzer
Sr Technical Manager, AOL
http://journals.aol.com/panzerjohn/abstractioneer