One should distinguish carefully between words and symbols. Words are the domain of languages, and each idiom has distinct orthographic and word creation rules. For example, you write "2 millimeters" in English, "2 millimètres" in Frech, "2 Milimetern" in German, "2 milímetros" in Portuguese, and so on. Each tongue uses its own spelling, capitalization and plural making rules. However, the _symbol_ is standardized, to avoid confusion: it is "2 mm" anywhere, even in non-Latin script systems. Even in cases of different spelling. For example, in Portuguese, kilogram is written "quilograma", because 'k' does not belong to our alphabet, but the symbol is always "kg". Two secons is "2 s", never "2 sec". (BTW, there shold be a space, like "2 mm" and not "2mm", so CSS does not comply. :-)
As our forefathers did, you can create new words using a large variety of prefixes, Greek or Latin or Saxon or whatever, but you have no right to mess with the symbol rules, which are object of the International System of Units, and later of their ISO equivalent. The SI symbols and their prefixes were carefully chosen to be unanbiguous, that is why you cannot use these prefixes with non standard units. Neither can you capitalize: "kg" is kilogram, "KG" stands for kelvin-gauss. (I used these prefixing rules some years ago to build a symbol parser, used to calculate derived unit conversion factors. To avoid umbuiguity, prefixes are strictly forbidden for non-standard symbols.) Yes, you are free to write "two millipoints", but not to write "2 mpt". Nobody will understand anyway. Please use only standard symbols. Cheers. ============================================= Marcelo Jaccoud Amaral Petrobras - TI - Negócios Eletrônicos mailto:jaccoud [at] petrobras.com.br ============================================= There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't. Glen Mazza <[EMAIL PROTECTED] Para: [EMAIL PROTECTED] m> cc: (cco: Marcelo Jaccoud Amaral/RJ/Petrobras) Assunto: Re: IPD 2003-09-04 18:31 Favor responder a fop-user --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > One has to partially forgive our American friends > for such offenses -- > after a century, they still don't use the metric > system, you cannot ask > them to respect the prefixes. > Ich bin mit Ihnen gar nicht einverstanden! The prefixes milli, centi, kilo, etc. predate ISO by several centuries at least. Those are Latin words--millipoint is fine, just like millennium, century, or centipede for that matter. > But Herr Pietschmann is right, you should not mix SI > preffixes with > unstandard units, the resulting symbol can become > ambiguous. For example, > what would mean "1 min" ? A minute or a thousandth > of a inch -- a miliinch? > Yeah, I can't tell you the number of times I got a note from someone saying he/she'd be back in "30 min.", only to find out he/she meant 30 milli-inches! ;) Glen __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
