- From: Jim O'Donnell <jim@eatyourgreens.org.uk>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:34:47 +0100
On 30 Jul 2009, at 17:36, Sam Kuper wrote: > Suppose you wanted to mash up the Darwin correspondence data with a > SIMILE Timeline[1], it would help if the correspondence data was > (more) machine-readable. Now suppose you also wanted to add some diary > entries[1] to the same timeline, so that you could instantly visualise > when letters were written vs when diary entries were written. This > would be much easier if both the two websites from which you were > sourcing your data used a consistent, machine-readable date format. > > [1]http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ > [2]http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset? > itemID=F1925&viewtype=text&pageseq=1 I think Google News Timeline is worth mentioning here as an application which already does this http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/ It shows events going back to the late Middle Ages. I'm not sure how they've harvested the dates from wikipedia. Perhaps by using microformatted dates? So, yes, I think there is a strong case for using the <time> element to standardise publication of historical dates, not just dates in the modern period. That would include dates where only the year, or year and month, or a range between two years is present. Jim Jim O'Donnell http://eatyourgreens.org.uk -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20090730/4cc984e6/attachment.htm>
Received on Thursday, 30 July 2009 13:34:47 UTC