Ian Hickson wrote:
On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Henri Sivonen wrote:
How do proleptic Gregorian dates before the Common Era fit into any of
the use cases that states are used for in HTML?
Insertion and deletion dates are contemporary. Date form widgets are
meant for airline and hotel reservations and, hence, need to pick dates
from the near future. The time element is meant for microformats, which
means that it will be used for encoding current or near-future events
dates.
Right.
Wrong.
Microformats may also be used to mark up events that happened in the
past and people who are dead. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney
If HTML5 does not provide a way to specify datetimes BC, then the
microformats community would be left in the boat they're already in of
trying to fudge markup to encode datetimes BC. Little gained, really.
Regardless of what elements are added to HTML5, I believe HTML5 needs a
simple extension point where microformats can insert machine-parsable
equivalents and expansions of human friendly data. Data types are by no
means limited to those already covered by the HTML5 proposals:
http://microformats.org/wiki/machine-data
XHTML2 provides such an extension point with the (confusingly named)
CONTENT attribute:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-metaAttributes.html#adef_metaAttributes_content
Such an extension point could meet the use-case of making datetimes BC
extractable and also any use-case for far-future datetimes without
requiring HTML5 to explicit specify calendar APIs for them.
DATA-* is not yet such an extension point, since it is only to be used
for private scripts not public metadata:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#custom
Obviously, it would be /ideal/ if DATETIME could actually handle a range
of dates useful for educational and research purposes as well as social
networking and business and if schoolkids and academics didn't have to
fall back on extension points and homebrew code, but I accept that it
would inevitably be more work to spec and probably for user agent
developers to ultimately implement.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
