Re: Regarding HTML5 <time>

On 11/7/11 7:53 PM, Arthur Clifford wrote:
>   I don't know where to draw the line between what units should be supported and which shouldn't and I doubt the team at W3C want to have to make that choice either. And given that I can see the logic of a data tag.
>
> I'm not sure the W3C is the channel to try to get something like this implemented though. I think we'd need to inspire a user-agent developer to implement the desired behavior and then the W3C if it deemed ti worthy would add it to the spec. Ian has said on multiple occasions that he is trying to get a spec that the user agents will use. So, that implies new tech be developed and then standardized/specified after the fact.
>
> Whether they should add something to the spec or not gets back to the fundamental question of what HTML is and isn't?

I was impressed by the problem space that InkML attempted to solve in 
their specification.

It has sufficient units for scientific precision of time, force and 
sample rate, a basic interoperation section for MathML and both an 
archive and streaming modes.

If you're looking for sheer accessibility, tables are not fun to work 
with, but aria-activedescendant, Semantic HTML and other standard 
techniques should work fine.

Earlier in the thread I commented about switching to an ARIA hack 
role="time definition" -- I call it a hack because "time" does not exist 
in ARIA and so "definition" is the standard role. That hack works today 
in ARIA aware software, it is easily identified by spiders and scrapers 
and it doesn't require any particular consent from any editor, user 
agent or consortium.

For passive tagging of events, ARIA and HTML (metadata or not) are 
sufficient for expressing time.
If you're looking at something more advanced, like high precision 
metrics, it makes sense to branch out into other W3C specs.

FWIW: I'm not against <time>, the tag is still present on schema.org, 
and I'm a big SQL fan, where timestamptz (timestamp with timezone) lives 
in a real-way.

HTML5 has one single editor, I suggest using other means, such as ARIA 
roles with fallback or the itemprop attributes, at least in those areas, 
you won't be blocked by the decisions of one person.


-Charles

Received on Tuesday, 8 November 2011 04:17:22 UTC