[Bug 10318] time element shouldn't alter the display value

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10318


Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|WONTFIX                     |




--- Comment #3 from Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com>  2010-09-12 17:32:22 ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> We used to have it so that if you provided textual content, it wouldn't replace
> it. People complained and said it should always replace it.

Where?  Replacing automatically is a really bad idea in practically all
circumstances, IMO.  Have you checked with any implementers to see if they'd
even consider replacing?

> At this point I don't really know what to do. If we make it do nothing, then
> people will get the datetime attribute's value wrong all the time since it will
> be hidden metadata.

But even if browsers were willing to replace the contents (which I personally
doubt), old browsers still wouldn't, so authors would refuse to use the
contents anyway for years to come.

Even if datetime isn't specified and the contents are in the wrong format, the
element is still useful -- <time pubdate>September 12, 2010</time> encodes more
information than without the <time>.  You need a natural-language date parser
to extract it, but practically speaking those are readily available for
English, at least (e.g., strtotime() in PHP).

As far as I can see, the biggest use of <time> is pubdate and the biggest use
of that is to give info to search engines (which can afford natural-language
date parsers in practice) about machine-generated pages (a large proportion of
which are generated by a small number of software packages that are reasonably
likely to get hidden metadata right).  So I don't think it would be a huge
issue if authors used datetime="" and got it wrong a lot -- <time> would still
be pretty useful.  I don't think that asking browsers to replace the contents
with a localized time makes sense at all.

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Received on Sunday, 12 September 2010 17:32:24 UTC