Re: noted 3 issues re: time/data (was Re: minutes for HTML WG f2f, 2011-11-04, part 1)

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:55 AM, Ian Devlin <ian@iandevlin.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to oppose the intention to drop the pubdate attribute from the time
> element. Whilst like some other of the HTML5 elements and attributes, it's
> probably currently not being used for anything useful just yet, I can see
> situations where it would be useful to automatically know which time element
> on a particular page is the published date.
>
> Say for example there was a page with a list of tour or event dates. This
> could of course consist of any number of time elements, each containing the
> specific date and time of a concert or event. In amongst all of these time
> elements, is also the publish time/date of the page itself and surely it
> would be useful to be able to distinguish that one, quickly, from amongst
> all the others?

This doesn't seem useful - it appears that you're talking about a
human reading the page here, in which case you don't want a @pubdate,
you want some actual text that says "Last Updated: 1 April 2011".


> Similarly when returning search results would it not be more appropriate for
> the most recent (and therefore relevant) results to be returned, and the
> pubdate attribute could contribute to this as it could be used to determine
> which of the pages are the more recent. Google touch on this usefulness
> themselves on their blog:
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html

This seems potentially useful as a signal.

Note, though, the conflict between "publication date" and "last
modified date".  The former never changes, the latter does, and the
latter is always the same or following the former.

~TJ