Re: [whatwg] <time>

Charles McCathieNevile 2009-03-11 01.48:
> On Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:03:37 +0100, David Singer:

>> I'd rather have the historical pages say "In the 4th year of
>>  the first Indiction cycle of the second reign of the Emperor
>>  Justinian called the golden-nosed, in the 3rd day following
>>  the nones of August, at the hour of dawn in the city of 
>> Chrysopolis" (and then they give the Gregorian translation, 
>> e.g. 6am on the 12th of August 707 CE).

You meant: Give the Gregorian date inside the datetime attribute?
Gregorian date in the text is urelevant in lots of contexts. [1]

> Indeed. That's one of the ways it can be done. IMHO it meets a
>  huge set of the possible use cases. [...]

The current draft text says that <time> "represents a precise date
and/or a time in the proleptic Gregorian calendar".

This gives the impression that one cannot use <time> for such
things as David mentioned. If it is meant that one should be able
to use <time> for giving the date of the October revolution ...

<p><time datetime="1917-11-7">25 October 1917</time>
<p><time>25 October 1917</time>

... then the draft text should be changed to stress that  it is 
the *datetime* attribute which "represents a precise date
and/or a time in the proleptic Gregorian calendar".

The real problem is when e.g. <time>Easter</time> refers to a 
Julian date before the new calendar was introduced.

Jim O'Donnell 2009-03-10 19.53:
> On 10 Mar 2009, at 17:03, David Singer wrote:

>> The trouble is, that opens a large can of worms.

    [AKA there are lots of calendars to support.]

> This is already a solved problem in the Text Encoding Intiative 
> (TEI). [ ... ] <date calendar="Julian" value="1732-02-22">Feb. 
> 11, 1731.</date> [ ... ] We can't change the author's original 
> written dates, but it would be useful to normalise documents 
> using the Julian calendar to proleptic Gregorian dates.

Yes, the draft needs to clear up the (mis)understanding that 
<time> requires authors to place Gregorian dates in the original.

If the calendaric meta information should be available to human 
consumers, then then @title seems like a better place. The draft 
could recommend how to use @title for <time>.


Aryeh Gregor 2009-03-10 22.37:
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Andy Mabbett 
>>> How widely - compared to Julian dates - are those 
>>> published, in the wild?
>>> 
>>> You might be tending towards 'Reductio ad absurdum'.
> 
> There are definitely [too] many non-Julian/Gregorian calendar systems
   [ ... ]
> A much saner solution seems to be to say that HTML supports 
> exactly one type of calendar: in this case, proleptic 
> Gregorian.  

Again, this is about the datetime attribute. The draft should 
stress that the very text content can be in any calendar format.

> Authoring tools can be used to convert from other 
> formats to Gregorian.  

And in that regard, it should be very relevant to have a calendar 
attribute.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian#Usage
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Wednesday, 11 March 2009 04:46:49 UTC