Am 31.08.10 02:35, schrieb Ian Hickson:
#2 Restyling dates As others have already mentioned, in Japan it’s common to display dates as 20-8-2010, 2010-8-20 and 2010年8月20日. In addition there’s this fun alternative year system that’s still widely used, including in official documents such as driver’s licenses, based on eras. Currently it’s the 22nd year of the Heisei era; 平22年8月20日. As in Hixie’s example of allowing dates to be restyled to follow user conventions, it would also be very useful to allow this for year and year-month dates, as even Japanese people have difficulty converting between the two systems, especially for anything before they were born. Allowing year and year-month @datetime values would allow a browser to offer localisation of date display including conversion between these two date formats. For example: <time datetime="1935">昭9年</time> could be automatically restyled to <time datetime="1935">1935</time> (that’s the ninth year of the Shōwa era btw ;)This is an interesting point. I've made a note of this in the spec, so that once CSS actually supports rerendering dates (i.e. once we've proven that this all works in the first place for the dates and times common to most cultures) we can add this too. http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=5405&to=5406
I understand that it's not good to implement features that won't be used by anyone in the end. Nevertheless I am worried that this could lead to a chicken or the egg dilemma, i.e. HTML waits for CSS to implement styling (year-only) dates and CSS waits for HTML implementing year-only-dates before making them stylable?
I also wonder whether this needs to be handled by CSS? I think browsers could show a tooltip just like Opera shows a tooltip displaying the URL for links. Some browsers also use a status bar at the bottom to show this otherwise hidden data. It would be great if browser developers could give their opinion on this!
