[Bug 13240] Consider replacing <time> with <data>

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13240

--- Comment #63 from Peter Winnberg <peter.winnberg@gmail.com> 2011-11-02 16:05:07 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #62)
> For reference, I've uploaded a copy of the section on <time> as it was to
> http://people.opera.com/philipj/2011/10/28/the-time-element.html
> 
> It states that "This element is intended as a way to encode modern dates and
> times in a machine-readable way" and the first example is precisely about
> "verbose unusable microformat garbage". It sounds like people are using it for
> something else, in which case the spec should be fixed to reflect that if
> <time> is brought back.

Nice to have the actual text so it's possible to see how it was definied.

The time element could be used for creating a semantically rich web page. This
could just be because that person thinks it is important to use the right
elements to mark up the data (use elements that represent lists when the
document contains lists and so on). It does not have to have anything to do
with RDFa, microdata, or microformats. The data element cannot be used for this
because it semantics for it is the same as the span element. It says that there
is something here, but nothing about which type of data it is, just some data
in a machine readable format with an unknown data type.

What could the time element be used for, one example could be for converting a
date/time with a time zone specified to the local time zone. It has already
been suggested by others that the time elements’ functionally should be
expanded
(http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2011/goodbye-html5-time-hello-data/#comment-836013),
if that is done, great!

I’m sure someone will point out that it is possible to say something about the
type of the machine readable data in the value attribute on the data element
using the itemprop attribute defined in the Microdata specification. Indeed it
is, but if this is needed then this is a microdata specific element and it
should be definied in the Microdata specification and not in the HTML5
specification.

Let’s say that someone wants to do a document with *both* RDFa and microdata
(even if that seems a bit unlikely right now). RDFa seems to have used the
content attribute (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-core/#A-content) for the exact
same purpose as the value attribute on the data element. Surely it would be
better to agree on one *one* attribute for machine readable data that both
formats could use so that document authors don’t have specify the same machine
readable data twice?

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Received on Wednesday, 2 November 2011 16:05:13 UTC