{"id":610,"date":"2007-04-17T02:59:02","date_gmt":"2007-04-17T02:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=610"},"modified":"2007-04-17T02:59:02","modified_gmt":"2007-04-17T02:59:02","slug":"writing-numbers-on-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/writing-numbers-on-the-web-610","title":{"rendered":"Writing numbers on the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article today, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/articles\/web-writing-show-numbers-as-numerals\/\">Show Numbers as Numerals<\/a>, is interesting for those of us who need to communicate mathematics via the Web.<\/p>\n<p>After conducting eye-tracking research on Web users, Nielsen points out the differences between numeral writing for print (\"Don't begin sentences with a numeral, use words instead\") and the Web (use a numeral).<\/p>\n<p>A key thing here is that most users scan Web pages and rarely read everything. (Actually, isn't that true of print these days, as well?)<\/p>\n<p>Nielsen raises the following interesting point:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Instead, [Web users] scan the text and pick out headlines, highlighted words, bulleted lists, and links. [...] There are a few exceptions to this rule: lower-literacy users can't scan, while higher-literacy users read the entire page if they're really interested or in desperate need of the information.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I've noticed this - many students have trouble quickly scanning a page and gleaning the main facts.<\/p>\n<p>Back to numbers and numerals vs words. What came to mind was my page on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/numbers\/6-scientific-notation.php\">Scientific Notation<\/a>, where I extol the advantages of a more convenient way to write large numbers.<\/p>\n<p>I'm glad Nielsen mentions the difference between US \"billions\" and other-country \"billions\".<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>There's also an internationalization issue here: \"billion\" represents a thousand millions in American English, but a million millions in many European languages.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>We really should standardise (oops, I mean standardize) the usage of \"billion\", \"trillion\" and the like.<\/p>\n<p>In summary, I wonder why we bother writing complete sentences - does anyone read everything...?<\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\"><a href=\"#respond\" id=\"comms\">Be the first to comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, gives guidelines on presenting numbers on the Web.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[127],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}