[uf-discuss] Financial data, statements etc - any previous discussion?

[Ian Lloyd]

In the process of defining a prototytping and development framework that
will allow the department I work in to control UI aspects while letting
the technical team concentrate on the backend stuff. Part of this project
involves me creating initial HTML prototypes that are 'wireframe' in
appearance (think: boxy simple css with layout and not much else) and to
ensure that these developers don't go inventing new terms and styles, a
controlled and versioned  list of naming conventions. In other words:

> "Here are the id and class names that you can use and nothing else"

I can come up with what I *think* are suitable naming conventions for
things like navigation, headers, footers etc, but for financial data I
need to take a little more care.

Something that has occurred to me in the past is how great it would be if
there was consistency in naming conventions for data for example classes
that defined:

- a statment
- a debit figure
- a credit figure
- a total of any kind
- an interest figure

etc etc

The benefits are reduced when you're dealing with a banking system that's
closed off by security login (e.g. no real use  for aggregrators etc), but
there are definite benefits in terms of defining a standard that can be
adopted by different organizations, perhaps saving time in
development/analysis stage, and for users with specific needs that have
user style sheets, how great would it be if their banking/financial data
styles werwe portable and usable across different sites.

So, that's the preamble. Here are the questions:

- Has there been any discussion of this in the past? (I checked archives
but couldn't find)
- If not, is anyone aware of any existing 'standard' for
naming/structuring financial data?
- What would the community here recommend as my next steps to ensure that
the work I'm doing internally can dovetail with some kind of definition
that is publicly available?

I appreciate your comments - this is all new to me (first post on mf.org!)

Thanks all

Ian Lloyd
---------------------------------
A beginner's guide to web standards: http://beginningwebdesign.com/ My new
book, out now on SitePoint