At 17:12 +0100 30/07/09, Sam Kuper wrote:
2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. <<mailto:jackalm...@gmail.com>jackalm...@gmail.com>
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam
Kuper<<mailto:sam.ku...@uclmail.net>sam.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-10762.html
<http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html>http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html
<http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.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.
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would be nice to have a standard way of labelling dates in historical
documents so that they are comparable; I am reminded of Kilngaman's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=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248970679&sr=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.
