- From: Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com>
- Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:34:50 +0000
- To: whatwg@lists.whatwg.org, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Robert J Burns writes: > Hi David, On Mar 13, 2009, at 11:19 AM, David Singer wrote: > > > Can we drop this topic? Apart from suggesting > > a) that the fully delimited date format be required (extended format); > > b) that year 0000 and before be allowed; > > c) that parsing the body text as 8601 may be dangerous if it's notated > > the same way but not (possibly proleptic) Gregorian; This thread appears to be proving that dates are very complicated and that to get them right for the general case involves lots of subtleties, which would be a reason for punting -- only doing the simplest possible thing for now, acknowledging that that doesn't meet all desirable scenarios, and leaving everything else for HTML 6. Even attempts to produce a small list of changes that we have consensus on yields others disputing them, showing that we don't have consensus. > Right now we have a draft that: 2) allows 0000 without attaching > sufficient meaning to it I don't think that's the case; the algorithm for parsing a year requires a number "greater than zero": http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#parse-a-month-component So my suggestion for a spec change is to replace "zero" with "1582". That further reduces the set of dates that <time> can represent, but avoids the complexity of pre-Gregorian dates, and avoids inadvertently giving a meaning to them that hampers the efforts of a future version of HTML to do all of this right. Smylers
Received on Saturday, 14 March 2009 08:35:15 UTC