[whatwg] Historic dates in HTML5

Here are some (randomly selected) examples of microformats that are  
already being used to mark up historical dates in wikipedia, of the kind  
that would be illegal for 2 reasons; firstly, because they are not in the  
future, and also because they aren't precise (eg full YYYY-MM-DD format)  
or are ancient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Worship_Regulation_Act_1874
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septennial_Act_1715
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Everett_Millais (birth date in hCard)
1066 has one hCalendar, with: <SPAN class="summary dtstart">1066</SPAN> :  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066

In my opinion, in order for the time element to succeed, it must be  
capable of doing the same job as microformats, or - as Henri says - the  
time element will not succed.

Andy Mabbett has already listed use cases
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-February/018639.html

"Use-cases for machine-readable date mark-up are many: as well as the
aforesaid calendar interactions, they can be used for sorting; for
searching ("find me all the pages about events in 1923" ? recent
developments in Yahoo's YQL searching API (which now supports searching
for microformats):

   <http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/01/yql_with_microformats.html>

have opened up a whole new set of possibilities, which is only just
beginning to be explored). They can be mapped visually on a "SIMILE"

   <http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/>

or similar time-line.  They can be translated into other languages more
effectively than raw prose; they can be disambiguated (does ?5/6/09"
mean ?5th June 2009? or ?6th May 2009"?); and they can be presented
in the user's preferred format."

I suggest that the short list of apps that consume microformatted  
historical data should not be used to indicate that it's not a worthwhile  
use case. After all, I know of no user agents that can use time, section,  
footer, datagrid etc but we mostly expect there to be soon.


-- 
Bruce Lawson
Web Evangelist
www.opera.com (work)
www.brucelawson.co.uk (personal)

Received on Monday, 9 March 2009 10:11:21 UTC