[whatwg] A tag for measurements / quantity?

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Max Romantschuk wrote:
> 
> Having used the web for the past 15 years I've always felt that it's a 
> shame when you run into a page with a set of measurements and those 
> can't be interpreted automatically in a sensible fashion. Especially 
> with the fact that there are both imperial and metric units still around 
> in this day and age.
> 
> An backwards compatible inline element to specify a quantity would be 
> rather trivial:
> 
> <quantity unit="cm">12 cm</quantity>
> <quantity unit="kg">2 kg</quantity>
> 
> With this implementation a number inside the quantity element would be 
> interpreted as the numerical value of the unit. Other characters would 
> be ignored. That way old browsers would simply ignore the unknown tag, 
> whereas a browser aware of this tag could provide DOM hooks for things 
> like implementing a browser extension to convert between metric and 
> imperial units.

I don't really understand the use case here. What problem would this be 
solving? What do we have to demonstrate that this problem matters?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'