Michael MD wrote:
This would be acceptable:
<span class="duration"><span class="seconds">3</span> seconds</span>
Or if we wanted to use the hMeasurement approach:
<span class="duration" title="3s">three seconds</span>
<span class="duration" title="2min 3s">two minutes, three
seconds</span>
<span class="duration" title="2y 35h">two years, 35 hours</span>
<span class="duration" title="3s">three seconds</span>
this kind of thing would:
1. add complexity to parsers
Doubtless, but the questions we need to ask are:
1. Can it be done?
2. Is it worth it?
2. require people to be very precise in the choice of allowed strings
... eg: "year" or "y" , "second" or "seconds" otherwise dates and times
may very quickly degenerate into something not much better than garbled
freeform text dates.
Yes, like /any/ exact syntax including standardized class names and ISO
8601, it requires people to be precise.
It would also mean a lot more rules for authors to remember which could
result in a lot of invalid markup being published.
That's a good argument for keeping the names of recognized units
consistent and verbose: perhaps always "seconds" not year or m.
If dates/times are no longer machine-readable I would see no longer see
much practical use for any of this!
Well, strings conforming to any unambiguous syntax parsed with an
algorithm we define are machine-readable.
I am very wary of straying too far from ISO for dates and times
(or at least something that can easily be parsed by
javascript/php/perl/ruby/whatever built-in date functions or commonly
used date libraries)
JavaScript can parse date times, but has no native support for parsing
ISO-formatted ones:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Global_Objects:Date:parse
http://delete.me.uk/2005/03/iso8601.html
PHP and Ruby have functionality for parsing non-ISO date times:
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Time.html
Perl has no built-in functionality for parsing date times at all
(although naturally you can find such functionality on CPAN):
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq4.html#How-can-I-take-a-string-and-turn-it-into-epoch-seconds%3f
But in any case Manu's examples featured measurements, durations
specifically, not dates or times. AFAIK none of these languages have
in-built support for parsing durations or other measurements at all.
Does anyone have any evidence on what libraries capable of parsing
durations or other measurements are "commonly used"?
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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