On 05/07/05, Ryan Kaldari <kaldari(a)monsterlabs.com> wrote:
I think that perhaps there is an opportunity to
implement a more
broadly useful feature here: content substitution based on user prefs.
One argument that somebody will no doubt bring up against this is that
for server performance reasons, it is desirable to have as few things
varying per user in this way as possible (since you can't serve a page
cached with metric measurements to someone wanting imperial ones). Of
course, we already do have this for dates, and I for one would
certainly prefer "<date>15 January 2005</date>" to the current
voodoo
of "[[15 January]] [[2005]]".
I'm not usually keen on doing things client-side that can be more
reliably done on the server, but I can see that there would be
advantages to having a JavaScript implementation of these kind of
variables. Perhaps some code could be written that by default served
everyone the same page, with a personalised JavaScript inclusion, but
somehow spotted JavaScript failure and fell back on a personalised
rendering? I'm not sure how that would work, but it would certainly be
handy - the alternative would be to simply deny such configuration to
anyone without suitable JavaScript, which would be a shame.
the plane was shot at {{time|21:30|9:30 pm}} on
{{date|15
January|January 15}} causing the loss of {{measurement|89 liters|23
gallons}} of fuel.
Just a quick qestion: if you have an automatic conversion system, why
would you have a syntax that required specifying the data in more than
one way? I know this is just an example, but it seems an odd one -
especially since there are far more than two ways of formatting a
date.
I was pleased to note that the test implementation someone posted to
the list a while ago actually dealt with accuracy better than some
users - it didn't make the mistake of turning "300 metres" into
"328.08 yards", which is extremely unlikely to be true.
Interestingly, this example also alerted me to the fact that if we
were to have an automatic unit converter, it might as well deal with
the spelling of the units while it's at it: "liter" vs "litre",
"metre" vs "meter", etc [Of course, some American units aren't
the
same as their Imperial counterparts anyway...]
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]