Have a cross-browser standard for communicating common units

[hguijt]

As a non-American, I have absolutely no idea if 50 F is going to boil me or freeze me. I similarly don't expect Americans to know whether 100m is a long way away or quite close. Surely the computer could just choose to show us the information in units that we understand, by doing some basic conversion for us?

Could Mozilla please work on introducing a cross-browser mechanism for encoding common everyday units, and have those translated automatically by the browser to our preferred units? I.e. the page might encode as 

<unit>50 °F</unit> 

and because I have my browser set to metric units, I see it as 10 °C. This should work for common, every day units: I do not expect it to deal with all sorts of unusual scientific units, and I do not want it to have perfect conversion accuracy (it should absolutely NOT translate 52 °F to 11.1111111111111111 °C, it should just translate to 11 °C!). The goal is to make weather forecasts and map distances understandable to someone who is not used to that particular scale. 

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.