[uf-discuss] Currency microformat

[Ben Buchanan]

> As I understand the uf principles[1] "further development
> of the microformat" shouldn't be a goal in itself.  Further
> development of some practical solution to some real problem
> should be the goal.

Sure, it shouldn't be a goal in itself - but in this case I am
confident there will be further issues that could be solved by
evolution of the uf. So I think a reasonable goal would be "don't make
it impossible to develop the uf any further" :)

> OK, that seems clear to me, but why does it matter that we
> do this?  What's a parser going to *do* once it understands
> numbers and currency symbols?  As others have asked in this
> thread, what's the use case?

Once the parser can identify the *definite* unit of currency, it can
do reliable translations for the user and/or indexing/scraping
services (just as examples). People have cited Greasemonkey extensions
which already do this by making assumptions - commonly, assuming that
"$" means "USD".

The existence of the extensions suggests that there is demand for the
solution; which in turn suggests it might be a good idea to have some
way of feeding explicitly-specified units to the parser/UA.

Theoretically this could be addressed with a more general "define the
unit of a number" uf; but that does open a lot more questions.

As an aside; that could go something like....

  <p class="figure">
     <a href="URL defining unit" class="unit">name/code/etc of unit</span>
     <span class="sign">symbol or abbreviation which represents unit</span>
     <span class="amount">12345</span>
  </p>

cheers,

Ben

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