Think of any web context where listings of physical /or financial quantities is crucial -take an earthquake event as an example; 'hcalendar' with embedded 'geo' perfectly encodes 'time&place' information; but 'magnitude' and 'depth' would go in the <p class="description"> </p> part and they should retain full parsability by remote data-processing applications.
Reusing the hcard pattern for telephone and rel-tag, something as simple as: <span class="data-value"> <a href="/depth" rel="tag" class="data-name">Depth</a>: ( <span class="data-value">21.7</span> +/- <span class="data-error"> 0.2</span> ) <abbr class="unit-measure" title="km">Kilometers</abbr>. </span> <span class="data-value"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale" rel="tag" class="data-name">Magnitude</a>: <span class="data-value">5.8</span> . </span> would suffice. Easy an general enough to cause wide-spread microformats adoption outside web-geek circles! here's another example from a weather site: <span class="data-value"> <a href="/temperature" rel="tag" class="data-name">Temp.</a>: <span class="data-value">118</span> <abbr class="unit-measure" title="°F">Fahrenheit</abbr> </span> Trivial considerations: -data-error and unit-measure would be optional, since the former is needed only in a scientific context, while the latter is not defined for scalar quantities (i.e. the Richter scale for earthquakes magnitude above) -include-pattern should be supported, very handy to avoid html bloat in data-tables - since there are internationally recognized System of Units in place since the 60s, 'unit-measure' should conform with them, and thus restrict the set of allowed values for the title attribute to those specified in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI and similar documents for financial quantities (currencies) (...) I cannot find any previous discussion about such a fundamental data structure, aside from XOXO, unit-measures and measurement-errors need ad-hoc classes and rules; I thus believe it would be worth discussing a new Elemental microformat (??) Ciao! _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss