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sklarcorp / data-style-guide

Describes the standardized practices, grammar, and vocabulary for product data.
www.sklarcorp.com
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Degrees symbol #80

Open mwmalinowski opened 10 years ago

mwmalinowski commented 10 years ago

The degree symbol (°) may be confused with the ordinal indicator (º) or ring (diacritic) (˚)

I've noticed that there seems to be some inconsistency when the degree symbol is used in description fields. I think we should add a Description Fields section and include a caveat regarding these three similar symbols.

sklar-sherryp commented 10 years ago

Can you give me an example? It was my understanding that in the past we were spelling out the word "degree."

mwmalinowski commented 10 years ago

In the attribute fields we've been spelling out 'degrees' but there are degree symbols used often in the description fields. I'm not sure whether it's better to keep using the degree symbol in the description fields or replace them with the word 'degrees'. In addition to the main description fields we also have meta_... fields and image label fields to consider.

For example: 98-1076 Potts-Smith Micro Vascular Scissors has a degree symbol in the description but has an ordinal indicator in the image label (hover your mouse over the product image to see the label text). I have not found any instances of the ring mark in our product data.

I can only find three products that feature the ordinal indicator character, but I felt it might be worth addressing in the style guide because the characters have different semantic meanings. The major search engines are slowly moving towards placing more emphasis on semantically correct content.

Do you have any thoughts on the matter?