[uf-discuss] Re: Currency + Unit of measurement (Was: Currency+Product)

[Guillaume Lebleu]

Scott,

My feeling is that if we must start with the simplest form of useful 
data and pave the cow paths, then "price" in hListing is good enough for 
me, and there is no need to pave that "currency" path for now, or even 
discuss it, at least not on this discussion list:

    * Google says that the "price" classname is the 40th most popular
      class name on the Web:
      http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/classes.html. You can't
      beat that.
    * There seems to be very few cows on the "currency" path today:
      after hours of research, the only example I've found on the Web
      that disambiguates the "$" with a <span> or <abbr> and adhoc class
      name is the MacAfee example:
      http://microformats.org/wiki/currency-examples#McAfee.C2.A0.28http:.2F.2Fus.mcafee.com.2Froot.2Fpackage.asp.3Fpkgid.3D100.29.None
      of the top online vendors (Dell, Amazon, Walmart, Staples, etc.)
      care about disambiguating currencies in price.
    * Focusing on disambiguating only the currency can only be useful to
      me for conversion, and Greasemonkey scripts and other browser
      plugins for currency conversion seem to work ok most of the time,
      using other clues to disambiguate, for instance the domain name
      ".ca" to disambiguate the "$" sign.

Once we found more real examples, we can resume discussions here on this 
subject.

Let me know what you think.

Guillaume






Scott Reynen wrote:

> On Sep 29, 2006, at 5:09 PM, Guillaume Lebleu wrote:
>
>> I don't think Lorenzo is talking of: *currency amount per item/ 
>> product* as your title and example imply (that, I agree, is a non- 
>> starter)
>>
>> but of *currency amount per unit of measurement* (which is widely  
>> used - see for instance: http://www.bloomberg.com/energy/, although  
>> not in the context of a house/product/job in which case the unit is  
>> obvious).
>>
>> In "$25 per barrel" or in "25 ($/bbl)", I think you would agree  that 
>> knowing that the barrel is the unit of measurement is very  
>> significant, and even though knowing that "$" means USD dollars,  
>> overlooking that it is a price per barrel would lead to a big mistake.
>
>
> I think "$" is a unit of measuring currency, and "barrel" is a unit  
> of measuring oil, which in this case is the product the currency  
> references.  Though used together here, these are two distinct  
> problems that deserve separate microformats, one for currency and  
> another for products (i.e. hListing).  Measurement of currency can be  
> useful without considering measurement of products of purchase.  We  
> should start with describing the simplest form of useful data.
>
> Peace,
> Scott
>
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