Re: Dates & Times (was Re: Future of HTML)

On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Rob wrote:

> If we're going to discuss a way to notate dates and times to make them 
> more machine-friendly (mainly web robots,proxies,  intelligent agents, 
> and browsers) then we have to think/discuss what machines will do with 
> those dates.


Ongoing work on Dublin Core
(http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements) and other metadata schemes
addresses these issues.

Yes, one can/should also include human-readable dates.

Date format is moving towards ISO8601 (e.g. 2001-04-05T12:53Z for 12:53
GMT on April 5, 2001). Later C library calls support this in addition to
older formats.

Dublin Core supports a Date element, which may be qualified (date of
issue, date of publication etc.). Qualifiers are in development. These
dates refer to the resource itself (when it was written, photographed
etc.)

Dublin Core also supports a Coverage element with a Time subelement. This
refers to the content (a book about the Battle of Hastings would have a
time coverage of 1066 ad). Elements are in development; a draft may be
seen at http://www.sdc.ucsb.edu/~mary/coverage.htm


Andrew Daviel
Vancouver Webpages

Received on Monday, 20 April 1998 04:25:52 UTC