[uf-discuss] Currency microformat

[Ben Ward]

On 20 Jul 2006, at 07:27, Ben Buchanan wrote:
>
> So... I think <div class="currency USD">$50</div> would work as a  
> shorthand.
>
> It defines
> a) we're talking about money - ISO standard implied,
> b) we're talking about the USD variety,
> c) we're talking fifty units of that money,
> d) a parser could work out the numbers and the symbol.
>
> Of course you could use ABBR instead of DIV.

The problem of having the ‘USD’ inside a class attribute is that this  
hides the data from humans. I think that for the above mark-up, the  
USD portion does need to be part of an ABBR/@title. Buuuut of course,  
<abbr class="currency" title="USD">$50</abbr> is arguably inaccurate,  
since the @title should probably read ‘50 USD’, not just ‘USD’.

At that point it actually makes is clearer to me the fact that we're  
marking up numbers and units, not just currency. It leads on to mark- 
up like this:

<span class="number"><abbr class="unit currency" title="GBP">£</ 
abbr>50</span>
<span class="number">25<span class="unit">cm</span></span>

I've left the ‘currency’ class name in addition to ‘unit’. It felt  
intuitive as I wrote it. Whether any provisional ‘units of  
measurement’ µƒ matching the above should have an enumeration for  
such values: currency, distance… not sure. Go too far down that road  
and suddenly you're looking at a µf or specifying dimensions* instead.

Ben

(* To go entirely off on a tangent, a common way of describing  
dimensions, built on top of some sort of units µf actually sounds  
quite useful in my head: Visit IKEA, view a table and click a button  
to have a block representation of that table imported Google SketchUp  
or some sort of interior design application… Now perhaps it's just  
the lack of early morning coffee but that sounds alarmingly viable  
and certainly makes me feel that a units µf could be a very useful  
foundation to have)