[uf-discuss] 'currency' microformat straw-man proposal.

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Hello Joe,

On 9/21/06, Joe Andrieu <joe at andrieu.net> wrote:
> Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> > But aren't Microformats about just documenting what people
> > are already doing.  (I.e., the "cows path" thing.)  Instead
> > of trying to TELL THEM what they should or must be doing.
> >
> > If that's the case, then shouldn't we be documenting and
> > allowing things like "CDN" in a currency Microformat too.
> > Since "CDN" is very very common.  And so many people use it.
> > And not forcing them to use "CAD" (or else).
> >
> > Because honestly... until I did this last currency
> > globalization project (for work) I ALWAYS used "CDN'.  And
> > only used "CAD" now because we as a team choose to use ISO 4127 codes.
> >
> > But I don't think people are going to obey this on the
> > organic Internet.  (They'll just do what they want to a large
> > extent... which is good.)
>
> I think you are missing the whole point of a public standard. Microformats
> exists to tell people what to do. ;)  That sounds a bit funny, but I'm
> serious.
>
> Without clear direction from a standard, people use/do whatever seems
> convenient, hence "CDN" and "7/3/06" for July 3, 2006.  And that type of
> convenience makes it hard for computers to understand the meaning. With a
> standard, people who want to be understood by more people and applications
> can do what the standard tells them to do.
>
> The reason for using ISO standards (or other completed specifications)
> instead of coming up with our own from the ground up is because we don't
> want to repeat the work.  ISO has spent a lot of time discussing and
> debating the various merits of different options.  We don't need to repeat
> those conversations and spend that time reinventing what already works.
> That's where the "cow paths" come in. Your points about CDN are precisely
> the type of debate we can avoid by starting with an existing standard.  It
> isn't that your points are invalid, it's that a full discussion of the topic
> is a much bigger workload than collating and converging from existing
> standards.  Plus, with uF you can put "CAD" in an ABBR tag and continue to
> use "CDN" in the user-visible region, if you like. So, you aren't really
> losing much other than ambiguity.
>
> Would you agree that adopting the ISO date format saved us work?  Seems to
> me that adopting the ISO currency abbreviations also saves us work, for the
> same reasons.

Yes, I agree that we should be using ISO 4127 codes.  (I guess my
original argumement has gotten lost in the blast of e-mails.)

What I'm arguing is that... we should throw an iso4127 class name in
there too so that other currency codes (besides ISO 4127) could be
used too without (potentially) breaking this or other Semantic HTML
systems (that either exist now or will exist in the future) for
marking up currency.

That way we say... here, we have a currency symbol, and we are giving
a machine readable code in ISO 4127 format.

(Did I explain that well?)


See ya

-- 
    Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.

    charles @ reptile.ca
    supercanadian @ gmail.com

    developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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