- From: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>
- Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:14:58 +0100
- To: David Singer <singer@apple.com>
- CC: Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, Bruce Lawson <brucel@opera.com>, whatwg@lists.whatwg.org, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
David Singer 2009-03-13 00.57: > At 16:24 -0500 12/03/09, Robert J Burns wrote: > No. If my UA wants to present dates to the user in his > preferred form or calendar system, it helps iut enormously if > there is only one way to represent a date, from which it has to > convert. If there are two, and the conversion of the second is > a pain (which Julian is), this is a problem. Have I missed that you supported an attribute by which such conversion could be specified? >> However, this places a burden on authors that could be more >> easily handled by implementations. When an author cites a >> historical date they are often interested in it as the Julian >> date. Why should an author need to go convert the date to >> Gregorian date every time the author wants to use this HTML >> feature? > > So the UA can display it. If they don't care, leave off the > datetime attribute. It sounds more like one should care *not* to use @datetime as long as it cannot be used to insert relevant info. > If you are unsure of the conversion, say so in the text: > > <date datetime="0707-04-04>Two days after the new moon of the festival > of Artemis, Alexis the Orphanotropos visiting Philadelphia [conversion > to Gregorian date is the best estimate of the > translator]</date> It is a misnomer to call that a "Gregorian date". It is "proleptic Gregorian date". The regular reader is no more interest in getting such info than he is in knowing that your web page validates. It is pure geekery. >> Especially if date representation is the goal and not date >> comparison, there should be no reason an author cannot use >> the same ISO 8601-style representations for Julian dates. > > Representation is a minor issue. Definition of the name > "julian", of the valid values of the attribute, and of the > calendar "julian", are, and the cost to UAs of implementing it. If there were a scheme/calendar attribute that said "Julian", then all the User Agent would have to do would be to (eventually) inform the user that the date is meant as a Julian date. -- leif halvard silli
Received on Friday, 13 March 2009 02:15:47 UTC