Scott,
I am sorry, but your example is a very good "reductio ad absurdum"
argument against what you are advocating.
At 11:51 PM 2006-10-11, Scott Reynen wrote:
On Oct 11, 2006, at 6:33 PM, Guillaume Lebleu wrote:
Scott Reynen wrote:
So which of these tasks should we aim to make simple? I'd say the
latter, because it's far more common (well over 80%, I think).
I think we agree here. $99 is more common than 99c, so the former
should be simpler to microformat than the latter. Where it seems we
differ in opinion is that the latter should still be possible to
microformat.
I don't think disagree there at all, and I'm not sure where you got
that impression.
To paraphrase you, what is simpler? to give a solution, although a
bit less simple, to the minority of people who uses "99c", or to
ask them to change the way they do things and use "$0.99"? I
believe in the former.
I'll repeat my example here, because it doesn't require altering the
published content at all:
<span class="money"><abbr class="amount" title="0.99">99</abbr><abbr
class="currency" title="USD">¢</abbr></span>
This is the sort of absurdity that the credit card advertisers
engage in. What you see is 99 and what you get is less than 1.
Don't go there. Maintain the functional integrity of the
construction, or you will generate lots of errors through
uncomprehending use.
That would be displayed as: 99¢, just like your examples. It doesn't
prevent anyone from using the microformat. It just requires them to
provide a machine-readable equivalent in the standard dollar unit,
just like we provide machine-readable date equivalents in the
standard ISO 8601 format, despite published date formats varying widely.
I think you'll agree that the following is pretty simple:
<span class="money"><abbr class="currency" title="USD">$</ abbr><span
class="amount">99</span></span>
And most people in this community seems to be in agreement with this.
I haven't seen anyone disagree with this.
Now, what do we offer to people who use amounts in U.S. cents on
their Web site.
Have them provide dollar equivalents in abbr titles, while
maintaining the exact same published content.
Nothing or something?
No one is suggesting nothing, so I'm not sure why you're discussing
that option here.
If we want to offer something, then for "70 US cents" as in http://
www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/01/1088488063161.html? from=storylhs, we
could have:
<span class="money"><span class="amount">70</span> <abbr
class="currency" title="USD">US</abbr> <abbr class="unit"
title="cent">cents</abbr></span>
We could, but what are the advantages of this over the example above?
The advantage is transparency: what you see is what you get.
The semantic construction of the value you are talking about is.
amount
-- subcategory: currency
-- measure: US cent == US$ / 100
-- count == 70
in other words,
text\amount\currency\numberOf(US$/100 a.k.a. cent):70
You should be able to validate the relationship between what you see and
what you get (if they are stated differently) from (possibly a chain of)
mutually understood (by business and by consumer) relationships, such as
"divided by 100." Not just define them separately and independently.
This gives both the consumer and the business the ability to detect and
purge errors.
Al
My 2 cents
My 0.02 dollars.
Peace,
Scott_______________________________________________
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