Re: Units and viewer-based conversions

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Wed, 04 Oct 1995 18:34:23 -0400


In message <9510042147.ZM12815@jones.res.enst.fr>, Philippe-Andre Prindeville w
rites:
> Why not tag all of this as <units meas=lb>132</units> so
>that this appears as something "civilized" (well, given that the
>whole world has switched to metric except the US) like 60kg on
>a viewer that understands conversions?

Something like this was proposed in the recent I18N draft (see html-wg
archives. Sorry: no time to give a URL).

It's a reasonable idea.

> Some of the
>more archaic units like "grains" used in medicine and when
>specifying bullet weights will be harder to do, but nothing beyond
>the collective genius of the HTML working group... ;-)

In fact, the HTML WG was _unable_ to come to consensus on this issue,
basically because there isn't much in the way of implementation
experience to draw from. It's not clear how much of the problem
you have to solve in order to make it worth doing, for example.

So I'd encourage folks to hack something up, prepare some information
using the hack, and report back to us on how well it worked and how
well it was accepted.

Dan