On Sat, 4 Jan 2003 00:33:31 -0800 (PST), Anthere
<anthere5=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w(a)public.gmane.org> wrote:
And what about being able to choose in the prefs some
regional settings, us or metrics.
Then, an editor would write the measurement with his
prefered system in a tag : <tag>xx miles</tag>
Then, if the editor's unit system is the same than the
reader's system, say us, will be displayed :
bla bla xx miles.
When the editor's unit system is not the reader's
prefered system, will be displayed :
bla bla xx miles (yy km).
Once again, there is a precision issue. There are some articles on which
precision is implied and necessary, and others where it should be
approximate.
Poor unserstanding of precision of numbers seems to crop up everywhere,
with Journalists being particularly bad at it. In New Zealand, Currencies
are converted to $NZ for many stories, so one encounters such atrocities as
"The cost of the damage is expected to be well over $NZ1.93M. Quite clearly
this has been $US1M originally, and the context makes it quite clear that
it would be best to write $NZ2M. Another related pet hate which is nothing
to do with conversion is phrasing such as "more than 23 widgets". Which
either means "24 widgets" or could be better phrased (maybe "24 widgets at
the time of writing")
Anyway, back to wiki, perhaps the only way to automate precision would be
to use scientific notation for all numbers, and the conversion should have
no more significant figures than the original. (Or perhaps one more
significant digit, otherwise a sentence such as "1 mile is equal to
approximately 1.6Km" could get badly mangled)
--
Richard Grevers
Christchurch, New Zealand