Aryeh Gregor wrote:
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?
There is an extension:
http://converter.mozdev.org/
Judging from the documentation it seems to work rather well with trivial
cases.
But there are a number of situations where semantic information could
aid conversion. For example Finnish has a rather complex morphology
which makes automatic conversion tricky. The units will not be parseable
from the text without parsing the language grammar.
An example:
Lisää 1 teelusikallinen sokeria 2 desilitraan vettä.
Add 1 teaspoon of sugar to 2 deciliters of water.
The roots of the words are 'teelusikka' and 'desilitra'.
But it's still quite possible authors would not use semantic markup even
if it was available. Additionally there are localization issues, things
like decimal separators and such.
It might well be such a tag would end up being used so little that
automatic conversion would be the only viable option anyway.
Regards,
Max
--
Max Romantschuk
m...@romantschuk.fi
http://max.romantschuk.fi/
