On 16 Mar 2009, at 20:10, Tom Duhamel wrote:
It seems that pretty much everyone agrees on this:
- Allow the use of an alternate calendar, but only Gregorian is
required to be understood by user agents
- We only require the user agent to display dates; they are free to
do more if they like (conversion, ...) but are not required to.
- Calendar is specified in a new attribute ('calendar' or something
similar) and the value of 'datetime' attibute is specified in the
calendar specified by that new attribute
- If 'datetime' attribute is missing, try to interpret the content
as an ISO date. User agent could print the content as is, or print
in a more friendly way if desired (in case it was successfully read
as a valid ISO date).
- If content is missing, print 'datetime' attribute (in a friendly
way, if desired and set by user, or simply as is if unable to do
better)
- If both content and datetime are present, print content on page
and show a representation of the date in datetime with a mechanism
such as a tool tip
This seems overly complex to me.
Can we follow existing practice from TEI ie. datetime may only be
Gregorian and no other calendar - calendar (if present) identifies
the calendar in the original text (analogous to the way the HTML lang
attribute indicates the language of the enclosed text).
So, a date marked up in a TEI document as
<date calendar ="julian" value="1547-02-28">18th Feb. 1546</date>
transforms to the following HTML
<time calendar="julian" value="1547-02-28">18th Feb. 1546</date>
My reasoning here is that TEI is already in widespread use, authors
familiar with it will expect the same markup practices in HTML and
one of the largest uses for historical dates as <time> elements will
be transformation of existing TEI documents to HTML.
It seems dangerous, to me, to adopt a whole new standard for
historical dates in HTML when there is an existing standard in wide use.
Essentially I'm asking that the spec for <time> mirror the existing
spec for <date> to make it compatible with historical texts:
http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P4/html/ref-DATE.html
Regards
Jim
Jim O'Donnell
[email protected]
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
