[whatwg] A tag for measurements / quantity?

Max Romantschuk max at romantschuk.fi
Mon Aug 17 01:41:01 PDT 2009


Ian Hickson wrote:
> 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?

It might well be that there is no problem. From a practical perspective 
it would be nice to have an ambiguous way to mark up numerical constants 
in a document and thus allow a straightforward way of doing conversions.

Personally, the obvious use case for me is recipes. Even a relatively 
simple one requires a lot of manual calculation to convert cups, pounds 
and ounces into deciliters and grams. While some sites supply conversion 
tools for this providing the semantic information straight in the markup 
  would allow conversions for any document.

With the large majority of humanity doing cooking one could argue that 
this would be genuinely useful. Then again, it's quite possible no one 
would ever use this, and it would just end up cluttering the spec.

   Regards,
Max

-- 
        Max Romantschuk
        max at romantschuk.fi
http://max.romantschuk.fi/



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