[uf-discuss] First version of Currency proposal

[Mike Schinkel]

>> <span class="currency" title="USD">$1,000</span>
>> In the US that will mean one dollar, in Argentina (where I'm from) it
will mean a thousand dollars. 

I believe you misunderstood what I was proposing; a shorthand for cases
where it was unambiguous.  When it was ambiguous it would require more.
Unless I misunderstand, you would almost never use three decimal places for
money and if you did you'd need to use the unambiguous version.  Right?

>> I do agree though that there should be some sort of optimization.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is essential.

Question: How does a human currently interpret a website that is have values
such as $1,000 when it it was designed by a US company with US customers in
mind? Is there something in the HTTP headers that makes this explicit that a
machine could read, or does the Argentine viewing the web page just have to
figure it out in context?  If not, then we'd need a page-global currency
seperator too...

-Mike
P.S. I apologize on behalf of myself and my countrymen for us being so
USA-centric, but we unfortunately are. Hopefully globalization will open our
eyes and change that before much longer.

-----Original Message-----
From: microformats-discuss-bounces at microformats.org
[mailto:microformats-discuss-bounces at microformats.org] On Behalf Of Emiliano
Martinez Luque
Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 12:29 AM
To: Microformats Discuss
Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] First version of Currency proposal

> This gives me a chance to ask in a different way, why can we not 
> assume type=USD, amount=5.99, and symbol=$ from the following?
>
>        The book costs <span class="currency" title="USD">$5.99</span>
>

That example in particular might not be a problem but consider the
following:

<span class="currency" title="USD">$1,000</span>

In the US that will mean one dollar, in Argentina (where I'm from) it will
mean a thousand dollars. And tying this to the currency identification (even
though the first 2 letters represent a country) will not solve the issue,
since I should be able to markup values in different currencies within a
single web page. I do agree though that there should be some sort of
optimization.
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discuss at microformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss