Re: Allowing nested <time> elements.

Ian Devlin <ian.devlin@gmail.com>, 2015-07-03 12:13 +0200:
> Archived-At: <http://www.w3.org/mid/CAOYOhSvESKpwch7tK6tB06YxeM63UTSE44cM174JedmKRAJTtw@mail.gmail.com>
> 
> There is, apparently, a constraint on the <time> element that forbids them
> from being nested. This constraint is not mentioned in the specification
> itself but I did find it mentioned in an old, out of date, document (
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/time.html#time-constraints). The W3C
> validator also marks nested <time> elements as an error.
...
> Does anyone know why this constraint was added?

Hixie added that constraint in 2009 https://html5.org/r/3692 and then
dropped it in 2011 https://html5.org/r/6783 when he briefly replaced the
<time> element with the <data> element. A couple weeks later, he re-
introduced a different <time> element https://html5.org/r/6827 that didn’t
have that same constraint which the old <time> element had.

> Is it still necessary?

I think it’s not. Otherwise Hixie would have re-specced it with that
constraint when he re-defined it in its current form.

> Or is what I am saying irrelevant, that this contraint has been removed
> from the spec. and the validator has not yet been updated?

The validator hasn’t been updated. I added the code in 2009 to check that
constraint around the same time Hixie initially added the constraint to the
spec. And I haven’t touched that line of the code since.

So thanks for catching it. It’s just a bug in the validator—or was, since
I’ve fixed it just now in
https://github.com/validator/validator/commit/44c7b8554d592f181dd0479160e8e02fde043886
and pushed the fix to https://validator.w3.org/nu/

  —Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith https://people.w3.org/mike