[thelist] (OT) Looking for info on units of measurement

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Howells" <webdev@mountain.ch>
To: <thelist@lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Friday, August 16, 2002 07:35
Subject: Re: [thelist] (OT) Looking for info on units of measurement


> Thanks to everyone for the conversion suggestions, but the above is correct.
> We have a project here is Switzerland, where the client thinks it's a waste
> of time including distance details in miles because "nobody uses miles
> anymore". I'm trying to find out how true that is, on an international basis
> (primarily for Japan, US, Canada, India, UK and Europe).

The U.S. definitely uses miles, gallons, pounds, and all of those wonderful
non-metric units of measurement (what? me? Bitter?  Nah...). I do believe that
the rest of the world has settled on SI quite nicely though.  It's a real mess
when you try to do anything international, especially in the academic and
scientific communities.  I'm sure that those of us living in the U.S. remember
the $125 million NASA probe which was lost because one team used metric and
one team used standard.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

The question now becomes for your client, "How many people from the U.S. are
likely to use our products?" and "How much are they worth to us?"  It's not
difficult to look up a conversion table for miles to kilometers or vice versa,
but if you make thing as convenient for your visitors as possible, then they
are more likely to return in the future.

Fortunately, server-side scripting makes displaying alternative units because
you can simply store one number and do the conversion at request-time.  8-)

Regards,
Jackson Yee
jyee@vt.edu
http://www.jacksonyee.com/