[whatwg] A tag for measurements / quantity?

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 4:41 AM, Max Romantschuk<max at romantschuk.fi> wrote:
> 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.

It's not very hard to auto-convert units without semantic markup.  I'd
think it would be pretty easy to write a browser extension that read
through a site's HTML and converted the units without author support.
This would have the major advantage of not relying on authors knowing
how to mark up their document correctly, so it would work in all cases
instead of in probably a small minority.  Has anyone written such an
extension?