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<div>At 17:12 +0100 30/07/09, Sam Kuper wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>2009/7/30 Tab Atkins Jr. <<a
href="mailto:jackalmage@gmail.com">jackalmage@gmail.com</a>><br>
<blockquote>On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sam Kuper<<a
href="mailto:sam.kuper@uclmail.net">sam.kuper@uclmail.net</a>>
wrote:<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>> Not for BCE; I'm not working on that period at the
moment, but excepting<br>
> that, here are a couple of good examples with ranges:<br>
> <a
href=
"http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.html"
>http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-10762.ht<span
></span>ml</a><br>
> <a
href=
"http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html"
>http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-295.html</a
><br>
> <a
href=
"http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.html"
>http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-6611f.ht<span
></span>ml</a><br>
> Now, either there should be markup available for ranges, or it
should at<br>
> least be possible to specify components of a date independently
of each<br>
> other, and to imply (at least for humans) a "range"
spanning these different<br>
> date elements as appropriate.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>Now, here's the million-dollar question: Why do you need
<time> or<br>
something like it for these dates? You seem to have them marked
up<br>
quite fine as it is.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>1) Machine readability.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>2) Consistency across websites that mark
up dates.</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div>Quite. We've had this debate before and Ian decided that it
might be confusing to apply a dating system to days when that dating
system was not in effect on those days, I think. Against that,
one has to realize that "the label of the day before X" is
well-defined for the day before the introduction of the Gregorian
calendar, and iteratively going back to year 1, year 0, year -1, and
so on. And it would be nice to have a standard way of labelling
dates in historical documents so that they are comparable; I am
reminded of Kilngaman's book in which he has parallel chapters for
China and Rome in the first century CE
<http://www.amazon.com/First-Century-Emporers-Gods-Everyman/dp/078<span
></span
>5822569/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248970679&sr=8-1<span
></span>>. It would be nice if one could determine that two
events in separate documents were essentially contemporary, despite
being labeled in the original text in different ways.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>However, whether the spec. formally blesses using <time>
like this may not be very relevant, as it can be done textually with
or without the blessing.</div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>David Singer<br>
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.</div>
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