I think what was intended, was rather than try to write a parser that picks up most styles of natural language dates, as you suggest- Instead write a parser that only picks up one or two standard styles of dates. Much like the style guides that are used in academia for writing standard forms of citations, and other things. Decide on a freeform text format that you know a machine can pick up, and excludes ambiguous date formats.
But you do raise a valid point here: Even if you do that, you invite the assumption from authors, that since it can pick up this format of date, or that format, then perhaps it will pick up THIS format as well. So authors will write badly formed versions of this freeform standard. There will be typos, too. All kinds of things can happen. But much of these bad things can be aleviated by one of the other suggestions in this thread: As-you-type validation. As soon as you type in "Feb" for instance, autocomplete style routines kick into action, helping the author write the date in exactly the right format. Then as they hit "publish" it becomes a microformat, proper, with markup and all. On Feb 6, 2008 3:58 PM, Michael MD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > people write dates, addresses, etc on the Web or on their emails. Asking > > people to write "Tuesday, February 5, 2008" in this order, with the > > commas, etc. is very likely even simpler for normal people than writing > > > you would *think* so - and it would certainly be nice .... but the behaviour > or most people out in the real world does not suggest that this would be > easy. > > Most freeform text dates I see out there are missing the year (how is a > machine supposed to work out what year was intended?)... > and a lot of them are in useless ambiguous formats like dd/mm/yyyy or > mm/dd/yy - ) ... then there all those other variations... to many to list! > > I've experimented a bit with trying to parse freeform text dates ... the > problem is as soon as its loose enough to pick up most of the common ways > people write dates it then also starts to pick up a lot of other stuff as > dates that were not intended to be dates at all! > > > > > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss > _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
