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Comment by anon4 | Hacker News Reader

So much thought was put into the design and yet nobody bothered to add an option on whether you want to see units in standard or american measures.

It's 2014, can't you people just detect I'm not american and put up normal Centigrade, km, kg, etc?

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That was maddening. I'm now testing autoConvert [1], a Chrome extension that promises to convert units automatically.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoconvert-auto-c...

"When French researchers analyzed the finishing times" They even went through the trouble of converting the original data...

And they translated the findings from French to English! The nerve of this American publication--writing for their own audience!

I think the tone of this comment is condescending and not constructive. The units displayed are "normal" to the majority-American audience of this American publication which makes most of its money from US advertisers [1].

Granted, they could appeal to a wider audience with this interactive presentation by supporting both SI and "American" (as you call them) units. But is it really an affront to not do that?

[1] http://rw.runnersworld.com/mediakit/international/RunnersWor...

America uses a measuring system that is not normal compared to almost the whole rest of the world, is maybe what is being meant.

That sounds like a great idea for a bookmarklet.

No, it should be part of HTML. A dimension or unit tag. It seems like a perfect continuation of semantic tags and the direction of XHTML 2 before the presentation-focused monstrosity that is HTML 5.

A lot of wikis do that (wikipedia for one). Eg {{m|1500}} is 1500m or whatever the user wants to see it as/the website wants to display it as. I find it extremely useful.

Units are harder than you might think. If I write 1 pint do I mean an imperial pint, a US liquid pint, or a US dry pint? The foot is equally tricky. This requires that the person writing the page gets it right, whereas with plain text we can rely on context to make a good guess at the unit that was meant.

I don't think that's a major issue. It should be straighforward to disambiguate: make separate units for imperial pint, liquid pint, dry pint, etc. If this is cumbersome, provide an option to set aliases for these in a meta tag, for example. If the writer of the document is sophisticated enough to be using these tags, they should be sophisticated enough to look up what the proper name is for the unit they're using.

> If I write 1 pint do I mean an imperial pint, a US liquid pint, or a US dry pint?

Since you are writing it you must know it and you can choose the correct tag or attribute for your html

There's a nice one at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Do-the-Math.aspx : "keeps your vehicle up to 44˚F/7˚C cooler"

I'm confused. Why is that a problem?

If I need to pay and the price is in 'Dollar' I assume the recipient can clearly indicate if it's a USD or a AUD that he wants to receive here. Francs and Swiss Francs shared the same name, but were different things (and had different abbreviations).

The same would be possible for the units you mentioned.

As long as we're trying to devise a standard for presenting units, i suggest this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

"What will it take to run a 7.2 kilosecond marathon?"

That's a straw man. Nobody argued against using minutes and hours.

This is not about blindly using plain SI units wherever possible. This is about writing for an international audience. Most people in the world don't use miles but kilometres in their everyday life. This especially important when reporting about an international event such as the marathon.

I'll admit that my comment was tongue-in-cheek and alludes to the fact that units are harder than they seem.

I suspect that Runner's World (an American magazine) knows their audience, and that they are mostly Americans (they do have some international sites [1], but I didn't see this article in a glance at the UK site).

Personally, I wish the US would just go with the metric system already, but that's another discussion.

[1] http://www.runnersworld.com/about-runners-world/internationa...

The thing is, they are talking about an international push by international athletes to break world records and the 2h limit. It takes data about events in many countries and while US recognise SI system still manage to convert everything to imperial units.

I am wondering if that's wise in such an international context, when not talking about a subject taking place only in US and affecting only US citizen.

I mean, even US citizens learn the International standard at school so why not constantly use to it when it's clearly appropriate (international sport, athletes and events places)?

Why are HN posts so pedantic? Bruce Lee has a great quote for this

I think that if you use the metric system you should develop a ten hour day - and a 100 minute hour - and a 100 second minute. Without that, Imperial units are best - right?

At least, you can easily divide an hour and a minute by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 15. Which is a little more annoying with a pint (...but who would divide a pint anyway).

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