On 12 Mar 2009, at 09:08, Robert J Burns wrote:
I did follow the suggestion as derived from TEI and I think it
could be useful. However, I think an approach that drew on RDFa
would allow the data to be preserved in HTML. In that way the date
can be placed in the 'content' attribute and the 'datatype'
attribute can indicate the form of the date in that attribute.
However, the HTML5 'time' element allows prose rather than
structured date information to be placed in the contents of the
time element. So I think a more faithful treatment of the TEI data
in HTML is to have the 'calendar' or 'datatype' attribute refer to
the 'content' or 'datetime' attribute value and not the 'time'
element's contents (HTML simply has differences from TEI that make
more sense to apply qualifiers to the accompanying attributes and
not the elements contents). Then all of the information is
preserved. Even if an author wanted to include converted date
information, the author could provide nested time elements each
with a different calendar and corresponding date indicated. The
contents of the element could then be any prose the author chose.
For example:
<time content="1917-11-7"><time datatype='html:Julian-ru'
content="1917-10-25">On the day of the October revolution</time></
time> ...
I wonder about the practicality of this approach when the HTML is
being generated by an XSL transform from TEI. The code looks hard to
generate from a simple transform, since the "1917-10-25" date won't
be present in the original. Taking a pragmatic view, it would be good
to preserve semantic information in HTML without requiring a burden
on authors to add extra information beyond that which they're already
publishing when they digitise a document.
The RDFa approach does capture a large amount of potentially useful
information about a date, but the overhead for authors seems rather
high. Shouldn't we just go along with what historians are currently
doing anyway ie. encoding written dates as proleptic Gregorian dates
in the form (-)YYYY-MM-DD? RDFa is still available as a further
option for anyone who wants to go beyond that and capture more
detailed metadata about a date.
For clarity, when I refer to author here, I'm referring to the author
of the markup (TEI or HTML). The original text will, of course, have
been written hundreds of years ago so we don't have any leeway to
influence the author's choice of text for the date.
Regards
Jim
Jim O'Donnell
[email protected]
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens
http://twitter.com/pekingspring
