Re: [whatwg] <time>

Julian Reschke 2009-03-12 17.53:
> Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>> ...
>> Ultimately, why is the Gregorian calendar good enough for the ISO but 
>> not us? I'm sure plenty of arguments were made to the ISO before 
>> ISO8601 was published, yet that still supports only the Gregorian 
>> calendar, having been revised twice since it's original publication in 
>> 1988. Is there really any need to go beyond what ISO 8601 supports?
>> ...
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> We aren't the subject matter experts on calendars and date formats, so 
> why do we pretend we are?

And may be that is why the date format is linked to @profile in 
HTML 4? In HTML 4 one can use @scheme to do

<meta scheme="Month-Day-Year" name="date" content="10-9-97">

where the "[v]alues for the scheme attribute depend on the 
property name and the associated profile."[1]

I struggle to understand why it is better to ask *authors* to use 
One True Calendar instead of e.g having a scheme attribute 
through which the author can specify the date/time format.

In the spirit on avoiding hidden metadata - where the metadata and 
the plain text often will get out of sync, it seems more important 
to have a @scheme attribute - in a meta element or directly in 
<time> - than to have a @datetime attribute. (@datetime should 
litterally be considered fallback for plain text dates.)

For instance, the Norwegian time format, as defined by the 
Norwegian Language Council is 00.00.00 (may be Norwegian ISO 
considers that it is 00:00:00). So then, just because I write 
19.30 instead of 19:30, I need to write <time 
date="19:30">19.30</time> if I want machine readability. It would 
be better and simpler to be able to specify the timeformat in the 
<head>, so that one can simply write <time>19.30</time>.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#idx-scheme
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Friday, 13 March 2009 16:03:09 UTC