On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 7:36 AM, Pentasis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pentasis@lavabit.com">pentasis@lavabit.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Ian Hickson wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
While I could see that maybe one day there'd be a use case for <time> that<br>
would need historical dates, I really think that we'd have to tackle other<br>
calendars in use today before looking at calendars that aren't in use<br>
anymore. So I'd rather punt this for now.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
While it is true that there are to many factors to take into account regarding which calendar, which era, etc.<br>
I can also imagine, (just brainstorming here) if I look at this example in the spec:<br>
<p>We stopped talking at <time datetime="2006-09-24 05:00 -7">5am the next morning</time>.</p><br>
This means I should also mark up something like this:<br>
<p>It was <time datetime="???">5 seconds after the big bang</time>.</p></blockquote><div><br>"5 seconds after the big bang" is an exceedingly ill-defined time, though. Currently you'd be lucky to peg it within a billion years of the accurate time, ignoring any relativistic issues with timekeeping. This was Ian's point about far-past dates being nearly never exact enough to justify a machine-readable timestamp.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">There are more factors to take into consideration in this example than just calendars.<br>
So... Wouldn't it be far more efficient and convinient to have a construction by which we can set a "base-date/time"? (something like the base-url-thing). That way you can set the date/time to anything at all based on a reference-setting. And this reference setting could be anything (another calendar, a specific point in time (or perhaps even time-space) or a relative reference. I don't think this would have to be dealt with by the UA but can be done by scripting.</blockquote>
<div><br>How does this solve the issue of the base time being too ill-defined for a timestamp? Assuming you have a basetime of "the big bang", you can certainly exactly specify exactly 5 seconds after, but how would you specify the basetime?<br>
<br>You're just moving the issue one level back. This doesn't solve the underlying issue that far-past dates aren't exact enough to give them a timestamp. This problem requires an entirely different solution, and trying to shoehorn it into a timestamp-based solution just gives you two bad solutions.<br>
<br>~TJ<br></div></div>