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

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

Marat Tanalin | tanalin.com <mtanalin@yandex.ru> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |mtanalin@yandex.ru

--- Comment #42 from Marat Tanalin | tanalin.com <mtanalin@yandex.ru> 2011-10-22 23:47:41 UTC ---
Dropping time is one of the most odd things I've ever heard as for HTML5 spec
development. It's like dropping all semantic elements in favor of semanticless
<div> and <span> elements. Completely pointless.

Power of semantics is exactly in having individual elements for particular
purposes. This at all cannot be bad since this is what semantics itself is
about.

I would humbly yet strongly recommend the editor to consider avoiding an
initiatives like such harmful proposals as dropping particular semantic element
in favor of something more abstract (and therefore _less_ semantic and
useless).

Quite the contrary, it makes sense to add more date-related elements, such as
<year> and <month>.

In general, there should be dedicated HTML element for _each_ _general_ class
of things. This could make possible for robots to determine text sense more
accurately and thus provide more relevant parsing results (search results in
particular).

For example, for search query like "birth year of Some Man", search engine
could prefer a year that is marked-up as <year> element instead of making
_assumptions_ about whether a number (not marked-up as year) in an indexed text
is a year or not.

<time> element should be kept intact. Only thing to probably do here is maybe
rename verbose and too usecase-narrow 'datetime' attribute to more compact and
universal 'value' attribute.

'value' attribute could be _consistently_ used in <time>, <year>, and <month>
elements (as well as for other elements that are currently noninvented yet).
For example:

<time value="2011-10-20">October 20, 2011</time>
<year value="2011">'11</year>
<month value="10">October</month>

By the way, I would personally prefer to use <date> element for dates that has
no time part while still using <time> element for dates that contain time part.
For example:

<date value="2011-10-20">October 20, 2011</date>

however:
<time value="2011-10-20T23:45:00Z">October 20, 2011, 23:45</time>

By the way too, it makes sense to simplify syntax of 'value' ('datetime'
currently) attribute to be more simple and similar MySQL datetimes:

<time value="2011-10-20 23:45">October 20, 2011, 23:45</time>

Thanks.

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Received on Saturday, 22 October 2011 23:47:44 UTC