[Bug 14202] Have a way to mark up the publication date and latest update time for <article> elements

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14202

--- Comment #5 from Marat Tanalin | tanalin.com <mtanalin@yandex.ru> 2011-10-20 16:29:27 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> We're probably going to be dropping <time> altogether.

One of the most odd things I've ever heard as for HTML5 spec development. (Or
maybe you are going not to drop <time> at all, but _rename_ it to something
more suitable like <date>?)

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.

> I agree that it would be good to have an update="" value too.

Good.

> We don't really want to do <article pubdate="" update=""> situation, since hidden
> metadata goes out of date quickly.

Reasonable.

> But I don't really know what else we can do.

Keep the <time> element intact. Only thing to probably do here is maybe rename
verbose and to 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>
<date value="2011-10-20">October 20, 2011</date> (in case of time->date
renaming)
<year value="2011">'11</year>
<month value="10">October</month>


(In reply to comment #3)

> <article itemscope itemtype="http://n.whatwg.org/article">

Looks very like to exactly an XML things that have made XHTML inapplicable in
real world and have lead to dropping XHTML 2.0 at all in favor of HTML5
langugage which is more _simple_ and usable for _people_.

Forgetting about this would be a _big mistake_.

Things like itemtype="http://n.whatwg.org/article" are obviously _much harder_
to understand and remember than simple and easy to remember and use things like
<time pubdate>.

To be clear, things like itemtype="http://n.whatwg.org/article" could exist
themselves, but _besides_ of more simple alternatives, _not instead_ of them.

Thanks.

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Received on Thursday, 20 October 2011 16:29:31 UTC