currency-proposal

Currency

currency is a simple microformat for marking up money amounts, such as prices of products/services or financial facts.

Introduction

Money amounts are one of the most widespread content found on the Web, but the lack of unambiguous representation of the currency they are expressed in, or the date that they relate to, makes comparison and matching of offerings online difficult.

Scope

This proposal limits its scope to:

• money amounts expressed in one officially issued coins and notes. This means it currently does not support money amounts expressed in terms of commodities or other liquefiable asset.
• money amounts expressed in one unit. This means that it currently does not support composite amounts such as "39 U.S. Dollars and 99 Cents".

Features

• Define currency once, use anywhere: allows currency units to be defined once and then referred to, instead of locally defined for each money amount, resulting in ease of readability for both human users and their user agents.
• Timestamping: money amounts have an optional date that allows user agents to translate a historical figure to an equivalent present amount.

Root Class Name

The root class name for a money amount is money.

Property List

• Required amount: can mark up a machine-readable numerical value with a spanelement or a string value with a abbr whose title attribute contains the machine-readable numerical value (See abbr-design-pattern).
• Optional currency unit, or reference to a currency unit (See include-pattern). Must contain a ISO 4217 compliant code.
• Optional date following the datetime-design-pattern, specifies the date that must be used to evaluate the value of the currency unit used.

Examples

Simple in-line example with local definition of the currency unit: $39.99

<span class="money"><abbr class="currency unit" title="USD">$</abbr><span class="amount">39.99</span></span>

Text representation of the amount: Thirty-nine Dollars

<span class="money"><abbr class="amount" title="39">Thirty-nine</abbr> <abbr class="currency unit" title="USD">Dollars</abbr></span>

Table example with global definition of the currency unit:

   <table>
      <tr><th>Price in <abbr id="u1" class="currency unit" title="USD">US$</abbr></th></tr>
      <tr><td><div class="money">39.99<a href="#u1" class="include"></a></div></td></tr>
   </table>