[uf-discuss] Currency microformat

[Michael Leikam]

--- Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:

> I think it has not yet been shown by sufficient research
> that a "currency at
> this *historical* point in time" is a problem worthy of a
> solving with a microformat.

Absolutely.  A lot more work needs to be done.  To take
Ben's original statement of the problem, somebody asks 
"$50" for an item, but is that US? Canadian? Australian?

Why not just write:
<abbr title="US Dollars">$</abbr>50
or 
50 <abbr title="US Dollars">USD</abbr>


If the problem is clarifying what the funny S means, that's
probably enough and no microformat is necessary.  

On the other hand, if we do find that more extensive markup
is useful, I expect that a timestamp will be quite helpful
when it comes to parsing monetary values, especially as
webpages age.  Maybe that's part of the currency format,
maybe it ends up in some higher-level format like hListing.

In any case, now it's here in the archives and we can start
with the simple things.

-ml