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An 'angle' element would be useful to cover the cases where angles are displayed as degrees/minutes/seconds or hour/minutes/seconds. Examples of possible angle formats: A) Hours. - 23h 42m 52s - 23h 42m 52.44s - 23h 42m - 23h 42.83m - 23h 42,83m - 23h B) Sexagesimal degrees. - 350º 21' 08" - 350º 21' 08.98" - 350º 21' - 350º 21.8' - 350º 21,8' - 350º - -45º 50' - -45º This covers the use cases of geographic longitudes and latitudes. Would be useful for microformats, but also could allow for styling (the same angle could be displayed as hours or degrees, and even the degrees case allows for North/South, minus-plus signs, no signs, etc.) DOM interface: interface HTMLAngleElement : HTMLElement { attribute DOMString angleRadians; readonly attribute Number valueAsNumber; readonly attribute Number valueAsNumberToRange; }; The angleRadians attribute, if present, gives the angle being specified, expressed in radians. Otherwise, the angle is given by the element's contents. The valueAsNumber IDL attribute must return the value of the angle, in radians, as a Number. The valueAsNumberToRange IDL attribute must return the value of the angle as a Number, in radians, reduced to the -PI:+PI range.
In general: Before adding a new feature like this, we need to show that it is needed. Are there really that many pages that use angles in a way that they would benefit from this feature? Specifically for HTML5: It's really too late to be adding features this close to last call. This would be something to examine for a future version, if there is indeed a need.
Thanks for the prompt response. This feature would be useful for content extraction and customization with any of the sites that display angular coordinates (latitude, longitude, right ascension, declination, ...). Also, it could help search engines to deal more accurately with such coordinates. For example, tell which sites actually contain a large amount of such coordinates, from those that e.g. just display their own coordinates. I own a site that displays thousands of angular coordinates, and I could keep living with the current status for my Javascript and content generation, but this element would make user customization much easier, plus the search engine bonus. As for the sites that deal with such angular coordinates, a quick research show that about 25 million pages do that. But if it is too late to add features (even when they do not really interact with anything else, except styling), let's stop that here.
> As for the sites that deal with such angular coordinates, a quick research show > that about 25 million pages do that. Assuming there are about a trillion pages (which is an estimate of the number of distinct pages on the Web in early 2009), that would mean that this feature would be useful for 0.003% of pages. That's a very very small fraction. It may be that the better solution here is to use microdata, rather than have an angular coordinate element.
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