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On 8/6/02 10:05 AM, "J. David Eisenberg" <catcode@catcode.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, Bob Hutchison wrote:
>
>> On 8/6/02 8:45 AM, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
>>
>>> At 12:42 AM 8/6/2002 -0400, Bob Hutchison wrote:
>>>> I could have sworn that the idiom is actually more like:
>>>> 75°15'00" N 43°05'00" W
>>>>
>>>> And I've seen:
>>>> 75 15 00N 43 05 00W
>>>>
>>>> I'm pretty sure the idiom is *not*:
>>>> <lat>75°15'00" N</lat><long>43°05'00" W</long>
>>>>
>>>> So. I don't think your's is an acceptable answer.
>>>
>>> Okay, that's one way to look at it. I don't think processing any of the
>>> idioms you present is that difficult a problem, nor are they nearly as
>>> jarring as converting the whole thing to a number or two.
>>
>> I agree that processing is difficult (I don't know that that is a reason to
>> do it though). I'm not a person who typically uses co-ordinates, so I'm
>> hesitant to say that one thing is more or less jarring than another given
>> that a change in notation is happening. For all I know giving up the actual
>> idiom might be sufficient to allow a complete re-thinking of how something
>> something should be re-written.
>
> In this particular instance, however, re-thinking 75°15'00" N as 75.25
> goes against decades (if not hundreds of years) of accumulated use of the
> former idiom, accepted by virtually all the people working in that
> particular field. The switch from a notation such as 75°15'00" N and 75
> 15 00 N is minor; the switch to 75.25 requires some real "CPU time" for a
> human.
I don't know. It seems to me that GPS co-ordinates don't look anything like
75°15'00" N. Of course they can be rendered/displayed that way.
>
> Similarly, 14:45 and 2:45 p.m. are common, interchangeable idioms; 885 is
> not. 885? That's the number of minutes past midnight for that particular
> time. Given the current discussion, that was instantly obvious to you, but
> you'd never think of using that idiom in any ordinary documents or
> correspondence involving times.
I'm not convinced that the users/authors I know are interested in seeing
markup either. Doesn't stop me from using markup, or them from using it --
and for the same reasons we can choose to use anything we want as text
values.
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