Tag Proposal: DATE

(Please excuse me if I missed a similar thread in the archives or this
is not the appropriate forum.)

I would like propose a new Inline tag for the XHTML2 Text Module: DATE

Like ABBR and other informative elements, DATE would be used to specify
that a text fragment represents a chronological date or time (hereafter
referred to collectively as "date"). User agents could allow users to
convert the display format in realtime or override the format using
stylesheets (for example to deal with the ambiguity between American and
European short forms). Subject-oriented agents could link DATEs to a
timeline or allow users to calculate the difference against another
date. Etc. (I'm sure everyone can think of other applications.)

Ideally the tag would be an aggregate of subelements that specify the
date in XML-friendly format, however to encourage adoption I'd suggest
either that the title attribute be used, much like with ABBR, to provide
the date in ISO-standard format
(http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html) or user agents be trusted
to interpret human-readable dates (for example:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar-1.12/html_chapter/tar_7.html). My
knowledge of non-Gregorian calendars is limited, but a calendar-format
attribute like xml:lang may be required.

I look forward to your comments.

~ Jared Warren <warren@cs.queensu.ca>
School of Computing, Queen's University

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2003 20:55:59 UTC