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I had a mental lapse and did the conversion wrong, which I already confessed to the xml-dev mailing list. What I should have typed was: He was travelling at <Velocity value="1">3.6 kph</Velocity> The interpretation here is that the schema author defined the value attribute of the velocity tag as having a velocity datatype derived from real that was always interpreted as being the velocity meters per second. The specific unit is the schema designers choice, though, of course. There is nothing that the document author can do to change the interpretation of the attribute. The document author could put just about anything in the element content, but a search engine that was trying to find any documents that mention greater than a specific value wouldn't have to try to convert velocities to a common basis. Information transfer can occur because the schema author unabiguously defined the interpretation of the attribute. For example, it would be real easy to color code the following fragment based on the velocities. He was travelling at <Velocity value="1">3.6 kph</Velocity>, somewhere between a <Velocity value="0.8">leisurely stroll</Velocity> and a <Velocity value="1.5">brisk walk</Velocity>. Again, this is a pattern that I have found useful that has the ability to preserve the specific textual representation a user entered while allowing applications that don't need to process that information to be able to deal with the ambiguities of unit conversion. Other than it would be nice to be able to extract the unit from the attribute definition in the schema, it does not require or suggest any changes to any established XML technologies. The initial message that started this hinted that xml should be much more aware of units. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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