[uf-discuss] First version of Currency proposal

Fri Oct 20 01:33:52 PDT 2006

On 10/20/06, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...

The @lang attribute specifies an ISO639[1] or ISO3166[2] country code
for the element it's applied to (and any descendant elements.

The W3C recommend[3] that the HTML element have this for every page.

You could easily, for instance have:

<html lang="en-gb">
[...]
<p>This product is $1,000 (<span lang="fr-pr">1.500€</span>)</p>
[...]
</html>

And hopefully a user agent would know how to parse the numbers.  @lang
also has benefits for things like screen readers and so on.

-Ciaran McNulty

  [1] http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt
  [2] http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso3166.txt
  [3] http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTML-tags.html