[uf-discuss] Currency microformat

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Hello,

(Hopefully this will get to the mailing... haven't been able to get
through in a while. But we'll see)

I'm actually working on a globalization of currencies project right
now.  (And have dealt with this issue in the past too.)

For us, each user of the system has a specified locale.  (Like:
"en_US", "fr_CA", etc.)  And with that locale, there is a default
currency associated with that.

In our system there's a PHP function that takes care of "printing"
money. All it really does is add the proper "currency symbol" and puts
it in the correct place (for the local).

Although, internally, in the database, currencies info is stored in
ISO 4217 format.

First guess would be to use the abbr design pattenn for this --
http://microformats.org/wiki/abbr-design-pattern

Maybe something like...

    Pay me <abbr class="currency" title="CAD">$</abbr>5.00 now!

Although something like the the following might be better...

    Pay me <span class="money"><abbr class="currency"
title="CAD">$</abbr>5.00</span> now!

But it might be more semantic salt than is considered necessary.  Just
having the abbr with the class-currency near a number might be good
enough.  But that's open for discussion though.

Thoughts?


Some other things to consider...  there might be an implicit currency
that comes with what's defined in the HTML "lang" attribute.  Like if
you have lang="fr-CA" than you could assume the currency is CAD.  (But
that takes some intelligence to do that kind of mapping.)

(Also, I know this is bad.  But I don't think we are consistently
using the "lang" attribute in our system.)


Also, this is all just my experience.  It would be useful to see what
others are doing too.


See ya

On 7/17/06, Ben Buchanan <wzqtptl02 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A recent discussion with a travelling friend has sparked some ideas
> about a microformat for displaying prices and other currency-based
> figures.
>
> The classic problem example would be a page stating a price of "$50".
> Is that Australian dollars? US dollars? Monopoly money? :)
>
> So anyway I'm following The Process
> (http://microformats.org/wiki/process) and I'm up to searching for
> existing formats/work. So far I've only seen the ISO standard for
> three-letter codes, no format or microformat for consistently
> displaying them.
>
> Does anyone know of relevant resources I should check out?
>
> cheers,
>
> Ben


-- 
    Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.

    charles @ reptile.ca
    supercanadian @ gmail.com

    developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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