[uf-new] Measurement brainstorming (was: Measure & currency)

[Chris Newell]

At 20:30 04/10/2007, you wrote:
I've posted a new "measurement" microformat straw-man on the wiki:

        <http://microformats.org/wiki/measure-brainstorming#Straw_man>

comments and suggested amendments welcome!

Andy,

I guess you may have been through this but my first thought is why not separate unit-code and value?

The reasoning being:

- Programmers hate parsing strings (particularly if you have to deal with a number of different formats and field orders) and parsing strings is notorious for causing implementation interoperability problems.

- Users may want to style the unit-code differently from the numerical value and the separation would make this easier.

- Users wouldn't have to remember rules about the format of the string.

Straw man #2 could be:

   <span class="hmeasure">
      <span class="units">[unit-code]</span>
      <span class="value">[number]</span>
   </span>

With the alternative:

   <span class="hmeasure">
      <abbr class="units" title="[unit-code]">[text]</span>
      <abbr class="value" title="[number]">[text]</span>
   </span>

The same thoughts would apply to the recent Currency strawman proposal.

Chris
_______________________ 
Chris Newell
Lead Technologist 
BBC Research