- From: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>
- Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:02:06 +0100
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- CC: Geoffrey Sneddon <foolistbar@googlemail.com>, David Singer <singer@apple.com>, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>, Toby A Inkster <mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>, whatwg@lists.whatwg.org, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
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