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

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

--- Comment #31 from Cameron Jones <cmhjones@gmail.com> 2011-08-11 13:00:14 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #26)
> (In reply to comment #25)
> > I'm definitely leaning towards doing this. The alternative seems to be to have
> > a whole slew of elements for this kind of thing:
> > 
> >    <time datetime="2010-10-10">
> >    <number value=10>
> >    <scalar value=10 unit=kg>
> >    <duration value="1h10m2.2s">
> >    <timerange start="2010-01-01" end="2010-02-02">
> >    <enum value="spring">
> > 
> > ...all of which pretty much do exactly the same thing: nothing.
> 
> Nothing except the one thing that matters: adding semantic value.

but how much semantic value is there in knowing that there is a time, duration
or a weight measurement on a page? what value does this have if the relation of
what it refers to is not known? 

these elements represent a bloated way of marking up a limited and inflexible
set of units and without any real practical purpose for the author or the
consumer. 

what is the purpose of <time> markup anyway? a UA won't be able to provide any
additional interfacing over such primitive datatypes. a resource consumer will
face the same problem of context, it might be able to find all data values on a
page but in isolation they are almost useless, and when distinguishable from
regular text anyway like dates, times and SI values are anyway, there would
seem to be little incentive for their markup anyway.

given the parsability of the text representations of these data values, and the
requirement of effort and overhead for authors to provide this information, it
might be more prudent to allow <data> to provide disambiguation instead of
declaration. 

in this way, a text value of "5kg" would not require any additional effort for
an author to declare, is backward compatible with all current documents, and
yet when marked-up using <data> would allow for pedantic authors to define
unambiguously that the 5kgs they refer to only applied at san jose during the
4th full moon of 2011 in the gregorian calendar, as gravitational force is
bound in space over time. 

a solution which fails to allow for complete unambiguous declaration is not a
solution for data.

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Received on Thursday, 11 August 2011 13:00:16 UTC