Toby A Inkster wrote: > Looking at your example, it does seem a little odd to mark up Augustus' > entire life as a single hCalendar event with a start and end date. Not > strictly wrong, but unusual. A better way would be to mark up his birth and > death as separate events - this has the advantage that you can mark up the > locations of birth and death, and even categorise the events as murder, > suicide, accidental, etc. >
Thank you for your response. I will interpret lack of responses to this thread as acknowledgment that the techniques described are regarded as acceptable in the microformats community. To your point, no event is atomic. All are divisible into separate events, and the scope of divisibility is relative to the interest in the subject matter. What do I mean by this? Consider the battle of Gettysburg. Maybe to you and I, it was a famous battle sometime during the civil war and most would put the event somewhere between 1861 to 1865. If we lived in Pennsylvania somewhere near the battle site we might know the dates from our schooling- that the battle was from July 1 to July 3, 1863. Analogously to your "Better" suggestion, should the beginning and end dates be described as separate events? To a historian, and to Wikipedia and commons, even this granularity is rather crude- on the Gettysburg battle we have a large volume of microfomatable information on its constituent events. There are a half dozen articles on the subject. Pickett's charge for example is of historic importance because it foreshadowed the slaughter of World War I due to the dominance of artillery and rapid fire rifles over massed infantry techniques of the Napoleonic era. Some of the events are extremely fine grained, for example the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Round_Top article. We even have historic photos of particular portions of the event such as a fierce conflict at the location known as "Slaughter Pen", that was part of this particular batte. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slaughter_pen,_foot_of_Round_Top,_Gettysburg.jpg Is the battle of Gettysburg one event, or a collection of thousands? Can a Byzantine politician's lifetime be regarded as one event, or a collection of thousands? I see no semantic distinction between the two, other than human vanity that our life events are somehow different in kind than other types of events, all of which are also aggregations of constituent events. We shall be exposing this information via vevents aggregated onto a web page. If the microformats community sees some utility in specifying additional structure between these events, we can deal with this downstream. I would hope that your community would carefully consider general cases that are widely applicable, rather than special cases that are applicable only to particular sets (such as life event of living beings- hcards with ddays- okay maybe for horses- how about battleships?- Ships are often treated as living beings.). These theoretical matters are for you folks to settle, but that's my two cents. For now, large amounts of work can be done with the existing standards. Thanks go out to all in your community for your service to the microformats initiative. -John _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
