Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
A number of e-mails were sent recently regarding the subject of historical dates. This topic was last covered in March in this e-mail: http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-March/01.html In the interests of not rehashing old ground, I have omitted from my reply below replies to e-mails that are redundant with the reply that I sent in March, cited above. On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Sam Kuper wrote: [...] here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. It's not clear to me what the use case here is. Without a reason why making this data machine-readable is important, it's hard to find good ways to solve the problem. However, it was recently pointed out to me that Microdata is actually a quite good way to address this. For example (and I'm making up a vocabulary on the fly here, I'm sure a much better job could be done), one could cast part of the first of the pages above as follows: span item=com.example.daterange [span itemprop=com.example.start item=com.example.date span itemprop=com.example.monthJan/span meta itemprop=com.example.year content=1877/span -span itemprop=com.example.end item=com.example.date span itemprop=com.example.monthJune/span span itemprop=com.example.year1877/span/span]/span On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, David Singer wrote: It allows you to build databases with timelines, that span documents on the web from diverse sources. This is apparently already possible: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/ http://www.google.com/search?hl=ensafe=offrls=en-ustbo=1site=mbdtbs=tl%3A1q=kittensaq=foq=aqi=g10 It would allow you to determine that *this* event reported in an arabic text with a date referring to a caliphate was actually almost certainly *before* this *other* event reported in a byzantine text with a date that is on the indiction cycle. The experts in arabic and byzantine texts individually might well have the skills to convert these dates to a uniform day-labelling system, whereas the interested reader might have the skills in one or the other, but maybe not both (or perhaps even, neither). It's unclear to me that there is actually demand to do this on the Web from the communities that would be required to actually do it. If there was, we would see efforts to work around the limitations in HTML, e.g. using Microformats-like solutions. Have we? On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Sam Kuper wrote: For projects like the Darwin Correspondence Project, machine readable HTML markup of dates might well simplify the various rather fragile and complex custom date search mechanisms these projects have historically tended to use, allowing users to access materials more easily and making APIs to such online corpora easier to create. Suppose you wanted to mash up the Darwin correspondence data with a SIMILE Timeline[1], it would help if the correspondence data was (more) machine-readable. Now suppose you also wanted to add some diary entries[1] to the same timeline, so that you could instantly visualise when letters were written vs when diary entries were written. This would be much easier if both the two websites from which you were sourcing your data used a consistent, machine-readable date format. [1]http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ [2]http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1925viewtype=textpageseq=1 These seem like problems that, if the people involved agree that they should in fact try to solve them, could be solved first using microdata or Microformats vocabularies. On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Mike Shaver wrote: I guess it's somehow useful to express this information to machines but not to humans, but sure -- I don't care if it's done with microformats or morse code. Can someone build and experiment with this to see if it's as useful as we're speculating, and if it requires standard rather than standard-based library support, before we make all browser and other developers bake it into their software? Indeed. As is described in the FAQ: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_the_spec.3F ...it is generally preferred if problems can have demonstrated need before we add features, especially features as potentially horrifyingly complicated as is being discussed here. There are a number of possible technologies that could be used to address this; I would recommend taking them, e.g. making a microdata vocabulary, and seeing if the relevant
[whatwg] Dates BCE
Orthodoxy has it that there is no use case for marking up an ancient date or fuzzy date like June 2009 using time. I disagree, and this has been discussed many times before. Do you have any concrete use cases or examples of how marking these up using time would be necessary? Whether or not it is useful, wikipedia does it -- a fair number of 4-digit numbers are linked to a page of things that happened this year, but those pages are far from complete -- they often don't even include the events being linked from. In theory, that could be done with a span and a class ... but the ad hoc solutions have clearly been found wanting. I would sometimes like to search on a date range, as opposed to a specific date; right now, I'm not sure how to do that cross-domain; if there were a time element, I would expect it to be used often enough that time searches would be more reasonable. These may all fail to the 80% rule, but ... they are of at least some utility, and I'm not sure how much harder it is to support them, given that time will exist, and parsing rules already have to be aware of such dates to the extent of figuring out what to do for error-processing. -jJ
[whatwg] Dates BCE
I note in http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#valid-date-string that Dates before the year zero can't be represented as a datetime in this version of HTML. This seems a serious omission. Why can we represent the birth of Nero but not the birth of Julius Caesar? Are there plans to rectify it? -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elh...@ibiblio.org
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
2009/7/30 Elliotte Rusty Harold elh...@ibiblio.org I note in http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#valid-date-string that Dates before the year zero can't be represented as a datetime in this version of HTML. This seems a serious omission. Why can we represent the birth of Nero but not the birth of Julius Caesar? Are there plans to rectify it? I sure hope there are! Historians and classicists are increasingly publishing to the web, and being unable to mark up years BCE in HTML 5 would hinder this. That said, marking up a year, say 1992 AD, (as opposed to a specific day within a specific month within a specific year, e.g. 3rd September 1992) also seems to be hard or impossible in HTML 5... unless I've misread the spec.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:05:10 +0100, Sam Kuper sam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: I sure hope there are! Historians and classicists are increasingly publishing to the web, and being unable to mark up years BCE in HTML 5 would hinder this. That said, marking up a year, say 1992 AD, (as opposed to a specific day within a specific month within a specific year, e.g. 3rd September 1992) also seems to be hard or impossible in HTML 5... unless I've misread the spec. Orthodoxy has it that there is no use case for marking up an ancient date or fuzzy date like June 2009 using time. I disagree, and this has been discussed many times before. Do you have any concrete use cases or examples of how marking these up using time would be necessary? -- Hang loose and stay groovy, Bruce Lawson Web Evangelist www.opera.com (work) www.brucelawson.co.uk (personal)
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 8:43 AM, Elliotte Rusty Haroldelh...@ibiblio.org wrote: I note in http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#valid-date-string that Dates before the year zero can't be represented as a datetime in this version of HTML. This seems a serious omission. Why can we represent the birth of Nero but not the birth of Julius Caesar? Are there plans to rectify it? There have been *long* debates on this. Basically, it all revolves around calendars, and the fact that, before the current Gregorian calendar was adopted, dates were *much* more complicated, and hard to pin down in a definite way. As noted in the spec, the current Gregorian calendar was first adopted in some countries in the 16th century, though it wasn't fully adopted everywhere until the mid-20th century. For dates, before that, you have to do some conversion to get it on track with regards to our current calendar. As you go further back the conversion gets more difficult, depending on archeology, essentially, and eventually becomes impossible. The only reason the spec blesses dates back to 0 is because it's easy to do when you're already blessing dates back to 1500 or so. It doesn't require a single extra step in the algorithm. By the time you actually *hit* that point, though, you're already pretty much in the have to be a historical scholar, and be pretty lucky, to figure this out range. In addition, note the use-case for time. It is *not* meant to be a general text-level semantic for dates. It's designed to make it easy to machine-parse dates around the current era for use in calendar applications, etc. (For example, one could automatically save an event from a page onto your calendar.) Plotting the birth of Julius Ceasar on a calendar may be an interesting way to bring that time period to life, but it's not really useful in the way that actual calendar applications are intended. Note: you *can* still mark up years BCE in HTML5! pThis event happened in 5 BCE/p is perfectly valid. There's no easy machine-parseable metadata in there, but so far there hasn't been much presented that would require such a thing. As Bruce said, if you have some concrete use-cases for why you need to mark-up the date in a machine-readable manner, rather than simply having it within the text of your site, please share! ~TJ
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
2009/7/30 Bruce Lawson bru...@opera.com On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:05:10 +0100, Sam Kuper sam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: I sure hope there are! Historians and classicists are increasingly publishing to the web, and being unable to mark up years BCE in HTML 5 would hinder this. That said, marking up a year, say 1992 AD, (as opposed to a specific day within a specific month within a specific year, e.g. 3rd September 1992) also seems to be hard or impossible in HTML 5... unless I've misread the spec. Orthodoxy has it that there is no use case for marking up an ancient date or fuzzy date like June 2009 using time. I disagree, and this has been discussed many times before. Do you have any concrete use cases or examples of how marking these up using time would be necessary? Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the moment, but excepting that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. Exactly the same sort of situation could easily arise when marking up BCE materials, although in this case one would likely have even less information (if any) about which day of the year was being used, so it would be even more crucial to be able to mark up dates in a way that just specifies the year but leaves the month and day undefined. Flexibility is crucial here and since it need not come at the expense of parseability, it should be provided for. Best, Sam
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: 2009/7/30 Bruce Lawson bru...@opera.com On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:05:10 +0100, Sam Kuper sam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: I sure hope there are! Historians and classicists are increasingly publishing to the web, and being unable to mark up years BCE in HTML 5 would hinder this. That said, marking up a year, say 1992 AD, (as opposed to a specific day within a specific month within a specific year, e.g. 3rd September 1992) also seems to be hard or impossible in HTML 5... unless I've misread the spec. Orthodoxy has it that there is no use case for marking up an ancient date or fuzzy date like June 2009 using time. I disagree, and this has been discussed many times before. Do you have any concrete use cases or examples of how marking these up using time would be necessary? Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the moment, but excepting that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. Now, here's the million-dollar question: Why do you need time or something like it for these dates? You seem to have them marked up quite fine as it is. ~TJ
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the moment, but excepting that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. Now, here's the million-dollar question: Why do you need time or something like it for these dates? You seem to have them marked up quite fine as it is. 1) Machine readability. 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: 2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the moment, but excepting that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. Now, here's the million-dollar question: Why do you need time or something like it for these dates? You seem to have them marked up quite fine as it is. 1) Machine readability. This begs the question. Why do you need machine readability for the dates in the Darwin journals? More specifically, why do you need machine readability in a standardized fashion currently expected to be used primarily for adding dates to calendars? 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates. What form of consistency? Date format consistency? This varies by use-case, region, and language. Machine-format consistency? You then have to answer why such consistency is important - what does it let you *do*? ~TJ
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
At 17:12 +0100 30/07/09, Sam Kuper wrote: 2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. mailto:jackalm...@gmail.comjackalm...@gmail.com On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam Kupermailto:sam.ku...@uclmail.netsam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the moment, but excepting that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.htmlhttp://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.htmlhttp://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.htmlhttp://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. Now, here's the million-dollar question: Why do you need time or something like it for these dates? You seem to have them marked up quite fine as it is. 1) Machine readability. 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates. Quite. We've had this debate before and Ian decided that it might be confusing to apply a dating system to days when that dating system was not in effect on those days, I think. Against that, one has to realize that the label of the day before X is well-defined for the day before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, and iteratively going back to year 1, year 0, year -1, and so on. And it would be nice to have a standard way of labelling dates in historical documents so that they are comparable; I am reminded of Kilngaman's book in which he has parallel chapters for China and Rome in the first century CE http://www.amazon.com/First-Century-Emporers-Gods-Everyman/dp/0785822569/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8s=booksqid=1248970679sr=8-1. It would be nice if one could determine that two events in separate documents were essentially contemporary, despite being labeled in the original text in different ways. However, whether the spec. formally blesses using time like this may not be very relevant, as it can be done textually with or without the blessing. -- David Singer Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
At 11:16 -0500 30/07/09, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: 1) Machine readability. This begs the question. raises the question. begging questions is assuming the answer in the premise of the question. Why do you need machine readability for the dates in the Darwin journals? More specifically, why do you need machine readability in a standardized fashion currently expected to be used primarily for adding dates to calendars? It allows you to build databases with timelines, that span documents on the web from diverse sources. 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates. What form of consistency? Date format consistency? This varies by use-case, region, and language. Machine-format consistency? You then have to answer why such consistency is important - what does it let you *do*? It would allow you to determine that *this* event reported in an arabic text with a date referring to a caliphate was actually almost certainly *before* this *other* event reported in a byzantine text with a date that is on the indiction cycle. The experts in arabic and byzantine texts individually might well have the skills to convert these dates to a uniform day-labelling system, whereas the interested reader might have the skills in one or the other, but maybe not both (or perhaps even, neither). -- David Singer Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: 2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the moment, but excepting that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. Now, here's the million-dollar question: Why do you need time or something like it for these dates? You seem to have them marked up quite fine as it is. 1) Machine readability. This begs the question. Why do you need machine readability for the dates in the Darwin journals? More specifically, why do you need machine readability in a standardized fashion currently expected to be used primarily for adding dates to calendars? For projects like the Darwin Correspondence Project, machine readable HTML markup of dates might well simplify the various rather fragile and complex custom date search mechanisms these projects have historically tended to use, allowing users to access materials more easily and making APIs to such online corpora easier to create. 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates. What form of consistency? Date format consistency? This varies by use-case, region, and language. Machine-format consistency? You then have to answer why such consistency is important - what does it let you *do*? Suppose you wanted to mash up the Darwin correspondence data with a SIMILE Timeline[1], it would help if the correspondence data was (more) machine-readable. Now suppose you also wanted to add some diary entries[1] to the same timeline, so that you could instantly visualise when letters were written vs when diary entries were written. This would be much easier if both the two websites from which you were sourcing your data used a consistent, machine-readable date format. [1]http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ [2]http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1925viewtype=textpageseq=1
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
2009/7/30 David Singer sin...@apple.com: Quite. We've had this debate before and Ian decided that it might be confusing to apply a dating system to days when that dating system was not in effect on those days, I think. If by confusing you mean sufficiently confusing that it needs to be avoided, then the proleptic Gregorian calendar would not be suitable for use in HTML5. Yet it has been adopted for HTML5. So either the confusion is tolerable or the reasoning has been inconsistent. I assume the former, and actually I think that using the proleptic Gregorian calendar *decreases* confusion by creating a mutually-agreed neutral vocabulary for dates that other calendars can be translated from and to, thus reducing the total number of mappings needed between calendars if all calendars are to be mappable to each other. Against that, one has to realize that the label of the day before X is well-defined for the day before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, and iteratively going back to year 1, year 0, year -1, and so on. And it would be nice to have a standard way of labelling dates in historical documents so that they are comparable; I am reminded of Kilngaman's book in which he has parallel chapters for China and Rome in the first century CE http://www.amazon.com/First-Century-Emporers-Gods-Everyman/dp/0785822569/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8s=booksqid=1248970679sr=8-1. It would be nice if one could determine that two events in separate documents were essentially contemporary, despite being labeled in the original text in different ways. It's not simply nice, it's a necessity for accurate automated processing of historical or other non-Gregorian temporal information. However, whether the spec. formally blesses using time like this may not be very relevant, as it can be done textually with or without the blessing. By textually, do you mean manually? If so, many exciting possibilities in online historical research would be rendered quite impractical (as they are currently) simply because of the massive amount of time that would be required to manually process each date conversion. This is a *very* real problem.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:34 AM, David Singersin...@apple.com wrote: At 11:16 -0500 30/07/09, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: 1) Machine readability. This begs the question. raises the question. begging questions is assuming the answer in the premise of the question. I meant it in the sense you specify. It begs the question by giving machine readability as a reason for allowing it in time, when the question is posed was why do you need machine readability? Why do you need machine readability for the dates in the Darwin journals? More specifically, why do you need machine readability in a standardized fashion currently expected to be used primarily for adding dates to calendars? It allows you to build databases with timelines, that span documents on the web from diverse sources. This seems like a decent use-case to consider. You want to search the web using temporal data as a search parameter in order to, for instance, create a timeline. 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates. What form of consistency? Date format consistency? This varies by use-case, region, and language. Machine-format consistency? You then have to answer why such consistency is important - what does it let you *do*? It would allow you to determine that *this* event reported in an arabic text with a date referring to a caliphate was actually almost certainly *before* this *other* event reported in a byzantine text with a date that is on the indiction cycle. The experts in arabic and byzantine texts individually might well have the skills to convert these dates to a uniform day-labelling system, whereas the interested reader might have the skills in one or the other, but maybe not both (or perhaps even, neither). All right, so another use-case: you want to easily compare ancient dates across the web, even if they're written in different and possibly unfamiliar dating systems. ~TJ
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
Can the historical-timeline community perhaps work with a microformat for such things, so that we can standardize on the basis of experience using the technology in the field, rather than on speculative uses? Mike
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: 2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: 2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam Kupersam.ku...@uclmail.net wrote: Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the moment, but excepting that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it should at least be possible to specify components of a date independently of each other, and to imply (at least for humans) a range spanning these different date elements as appropriate. Now, here's the million-dollar question: Why do you need time or something like it for these dates? You seem to have them marked up quite fine as it is. 1) Machine readability. This begs the question. Why do you need machine readability for the dates in the Darwin journals? More specifically, why do you need machine readability in a standardized fashion currently expected to be used primarily for adding dates to calendars? For projects like the Darwin Correspondence Project, machine readable HTML markup of dates might well simplify the various rather fragile and complex custom date search mechanisms these projects have historically tended to use, allowing users to access materials more easily and making APIs to such online corpora easier to create. Within a single project, it seems like you would use a database search. This is completely independent of how it gets marked up in the HTML. APIs especially will depend on data returned from a database. time is only relevant in these cases if you're screen-scraping. 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates. What form of consistency? Date format consistency? This varies by use-case, region, and language. Machine-format consistency? You then have to answer why such consistency is important - what does it let you *do*? Suppose you wanted to mash up the Darwin correspondence data with a SIMILE Timeline[1], it would help if the correspondence data was (more) machine-readable. Now suppose you also wanted to add some diary entries[1] to the same timeline, so that you could instantly visualise when letters were written vs when diary entries were written. This would be much easier if both the two websites from which you were sourcing your data used a consistent, machine-readable date format. [1]http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ [2]http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1925viewtype=textpageseq=1 Nice combination of use-cases here: You want to have an app that can aggregate arbitrary historical data from multiple sources to produce, for example, timelines. ~TJ
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Mike Shavermike.sha...@gmail.com wrote: Can the historical-timeline community perhaps work with a microformat for such things, so that we can standardize on the basis of experience using the technology in the field, rather than on speculative uses? I'd actually advise against trying to push this to the Microformats group. They're about marking up visible data in such a way that a machine can parse it. This discussion so far seems to be about taking a visible date (or date range, possibly fuzzy) in an arbitrary calendar, and marking it up with an invisible date in the proleptic gregorian calendar, with support for ranges and fuzziness. ~TJ
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Mike Shavermike.sha...@gmail.com wrote: Can the historical-timeline community perhaps work with a microformat for such things, so that we can standardize on the basis of experience using the technology in the field, rather than on speculative uses? I'd actually advise against trying to push this to the Microformats group. They're about marking up visible data in such a way that a machine can parse it. This discussion so far seems to be about taking a visible date (or date range, possibly fuzzy) in an arbitrary calendar, and marking it up with an invisible date in the proleptic gregorian calendar, with support for ranges and fuzziness. Spot on.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:01:33 +0200, Tab Atkins Jr. jackalm...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Mike Shavermike.sha...@gmail.com wrote: Can the historical-timeline community perhaps work with a microformat for such things, so that we can standardize on the basis of experience using the technology in the field, rather than on speculative uses? I'd actually advise against trying to push this to the Microformats group. They're about marking up visible data in such a way that a machine can parse it. This discussion so far seems to be about taking a visible date (or date range, possibly fuzzy) in an arbitrary calendar, and marking it up with an invisible date in the proleptic gregorian calendar, with support for ranges and fuzziness. It doesn't have to go through the microformats (lowercase m) group. Everyone can invent class conventions if they so desire. In any case, HTML5 also provides Microdata which could be used for this. I very much agree that experimenting with this before standardizing is the right thing to do. (That's how time came to be.) -- Anne van Kesteren http://annevankesteren.nl/
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Jim O'Donnellj...@eatyourgreens.org.uk wrote: I think Google News Timeline is worth mentioning here as an application which already does this http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/ It shows events going back to the late Middle Ages. I'm not sure how they've harvested the dates from wikipedia. Perhaps by using microformatted dates? Probably by looking at the category markup Wikipedia uses, which is specific not only to MediaWiki but the particular decisions of the English Wikipedia editing community. time certainly wouldn't help here -- this application doesn't need a way to say this text string denotes a particular time, but rather this event happened at this particular time. You need to use Microdata or RDF or such for that kind of relationship semantics.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Aryeh Gregorsimetrical+...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Jim O'Donnellj...@eatyourgreens.org.uk wrote: I think Google News Timeline is worth mentioning here as an application which already does this http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/ It shows events going back to the late Middle Ages. I'm not sure how they've harvested the dates from wikipedia. Perhaps by using microformatted dates? Probably by looking at the category markup Wikipedia uses, which is specific not only to MediaWiki but the particular decisions of the English Wikipedia editing community. time certainly wouldn't help here -- this application doesn't need a way to say this text string denotes a particular time, but rather this event happened at this particular time. You need to use Microdata or RDF or such for that kind of relationship semantics. Nod - automated mashups of that kind are outside of the ability of time, even if extended to handle those dates. It seems that the useful things to do are: * directed mashups, where you can manually point an app at particular dates that you catch across the web and automatically slurp them. * more reliable temporal searching, at least for pages that include this kind of markup. Rather than just searching using 2000 BC or whatever and hoping that the target page includes that phrase, the search engine could also take note of manually encoded times and use these to help filter the returned results ~TJ
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
2009/7/30 Aryeh Gregor simetrical+...@gmail.com time certainly wouldn't help here -- this application doesn't need a way to say this text string denotes a particular time, but rather this event happened at this particular time. The latter presupposes the former. That's why being able to mark historical dates up with time or date or year (etc, as appropriate) would be so useful, and indeed appropriate in HTML5.
Re: [whatwg] Dates BCE
David Singer wrote: Against that, one has to realize that the label of the day before X is well-defined for the day before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, and iteratively going back to year 1, year 0, year -1, and so on. In neither the Gregorian nor the Julian calendars is there a year 0, as used in conventional speech (formats designed for machine computation treat the issue a little differently). -- Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth
