[uf-discuss] Currency microformat

Wed Jul 19 19:38:05 PDT 2006

--- Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> I think it has not yet been shown by sufficient research
> that a "currency at
> this *historical* point in time" is a problem worthy of a
> solving with a microformat.

Absolutely. A lot more work needs to be done. To take
Ben's original statement of the problem, somebody asks 
"50ドル" for an item, but is that US? Canadian? Australian?
Why not just write:
<abbr title="US Dollars">$</abbr>50
or 
50 <abbr title="US Dollars">USD</abbr>
If the problem is clarifying what the funny S means, that's
probably enough and no microformat is necessary. 
On the other hand, if we do find that more extensive markup
is useful, I expect that a timestamp will be quite helpful
when it comes to parsing monetary values, especially as
webpages age. Maybe that's part of the currency format,
maybe it ends up in some higher-level format like hListing.
In any case, now it's here in the archives and we can start
with the simple things.
-ml