Re: [whatwg] <time>

Smylers 2009-03-16 22.03:
> Tom Duhamel writes:

> Hi Tom.  I'd like you to clarify an aspect of your proposal:
> 
>> <time>2009-03-16</time>
>> Printing directly on the page, no tool tip: "March 16, 2009"

W3C Internationalization allready have a FAQ comment regarding the 
behaviour that Tom proposes here [1]:

"Some have advocated the creation of a <date> tag that would 
display dates according the locale of the user agent. This is 
subject to the same practical issues as described for dynamic date 
generation with the Japanese example. The appropriate format is 
generally a function of the linguistic context of a page, rather 
than the user's platform."

The "Japanese example" (which discusses using HTTP accept-language 
negotiation):

"* A Japanese person reading the generated date 03/04/02 in an 
English document might mistakenly assume that this used an English 
ordering.
*  Displaying a generated date in a Japanese date format such as 
２００３年４月２日 in an English page would probably look out of 
place."

Thus, in a way, such a proposal works against the advice to insert 
dates using ISO. I don't think we want it. (It looks funnily 
enough when e.g. an English Web site suddenly displays parts of 
the pages in Norwegian only because content negotations works "too 
well".

[1] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-date-format#bytheway
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Monday, 16 March 2009 23:40:09 UTC