[uf-discuss] Currency microformat

[Ciaran McNulty]

On 7/18/06, Mike Stickel <mike at screenflicker.com> wrote:
>Since there can be a difference between different languages within
> countries I thought it might be a good idea to include that in the
> "currency" definition of the formating, eg., "CAD eng" or "CAD fr".

If you need to specify the language, for instance to indicate how to
interpret the chars/spacing in the number formatting, HTML has the
@lang attribute which covers this   (@lang="fr_CA" and @lang="en_CA"
in this case).

However, there's been a lot of close coupling of the concepts of
'language' and 'currency' in this discussion so far and I don't think
that's at all necessary - I should be able to go to a foreign website
that provides an English translation without my user-agent assuming
the  prices are in US Dollars, for example.

> So far on the examples sent to the list there has been no definition
> around the actual dollar amount which confused me a bit. I'm curious,
> is there a reason for that?

The only microformat that I've noticed currency units in is hListing,
and that deliberately shies away from parsing the actual values
because it's too free-form in most existing Listing formats.

My own preference would be for something like:
<p class="money">This item costs
  <span class="currency">GBP</span>
  <span class="amount">10.00</span>
</p>

Which with similar parsing rules to existing formats would also allow
things like:
<p class="money">
  It'll cost you
  <abbr class="currency" title="50.00">fifty</abbr>
  <abbr class="amount" title="GBP">quid</abbr>
  , mate!
</p>

Or, a more complex example with multiple languages:
<p lang="en">
<span class="money">

  <span class="amount">50</span>
  <abbr class="currency" title="GBP">&pound;</abbr>
</span>
<span lang="fr" class="money">
  (c'est
  <span class="amount">75</span>
  <abbr class="currency" title="EUR">&euro;</abbr>
  pour ca)
</span>
</p>

(sorry about the bad french)

It'd be pretty neat to have a browser widget that converted all the
USD prices on an American site into their equivalent GBP on mouseover,
or something along those lines.

-C