On Oct 12, 2006, at 7:35 AM, Al Gilman wrote:
<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.
I'm not sure what this means. Do you not think 99¢ means
fundamentally the same thing as 0.99USD?
What you see is 99 and what you get is less than 1.
That's only true if you consider the value outside the context of the
currency, and I don't know why anyone would do that. "99" is a
meaningless monetary value without a currency assigned. If the
currency is going to be optional, I think it at least needs to be
implied. Otherwise we just have a number with no idea what it
means. And if there's an established currency, then why not use the
unit already explicitly defined by that currency's ISO 4217 code?
Why throw away the "D" in "USD"?
Don't go there. Maintain the functional integrity of the
construction, or you will generate lots of errors through
uncomprehending use.
In my above example, the publisher only needs to understand the
relationship between dollars and cents (just like I need to
understand the relationship between "January 1, 2000" and
"2000-01-01"). In the example with an additional units property, the
publisher only needs to know the standard symbol for their unit of
choice (e.g. "cent"). I think the former knowledge is much more
common than the latter.
We don't even know the latter ourselves. If we're going to allow
various units within any given currency, how would publishers (and
parsers) know which units are commonly accepted, and what are the
common symbols for identifying those units? Are we going to create
our own list of every possible currency unit? If there isn't an
existing standard here, that might be a good indication that there
isn't a need for a standard here, because conversion to the default
unit is a common and trivial practice.
How many currencies are we even talking about here anyway? Looking
at the ISO 4217 list, it seems to me most of these currencies (maybe
80%?) only have one unit to choose, which suggests to me that
allowing for communication in other units is an unnecessary
complication. Are there really enough multi-unit currencies that
it's worth trying to standardize the non-default units?
Peace,
Scott_______________________________________________
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