On Sat, 4 Jan 2003 00:33:31 -0800 (PST), Anthere anthere5=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w@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)