Breton Slivka wrote:
I offer the challenge to those developers: If you sincerely believe that simple internationalized date parsing is an unsolvable or difficult problem (which, as I have pointed out has been solved numerous times already, with two examples), please present your evidence. Why is avoiding this work more important than Accessibility? Why is avoiding this work more important than avoiding hidden metadata?
The examples you gave (ecmascript, spreadsheets) relate to the interpretation of a single simple date string. Much of the discussion here has instead been about the interpretation of marked up paragraphs of natural language prose where dates are mentioned. The former is a big enough job, as you point out. But the latter is a substantially larger undertaking.
Imagine the English language permutations of "Tuesday the forteenth of July, next year" in terms of word order. Then allow for all natural languages (in all written scripts). And don't forget we use a variety of calendars. Big job. In theory it could be attempted; but the culture around here is averse to 'theoretical' solutions.
While there is value in minimising "hidden metadata", this isn't an all or nothing decision. Having the data within the HTML document itself is already a big win in many cases, compared to putting it in a separate XML file. Having the data local to the paragraph within the HTML document (rather than in the head section) is also a major achievement w.r.t. maintainability. Both of these factors reduce the hiddenness of data; putting info in an attribute is not the end of the world. Given the other tradeoffs, I think it should be seriously considered.
cheers, Dan -- http://danbri.org/ _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
