[whatwg] Joe Clark's Criticisms of the WHATWG and HTML 5

[Matthew Raymond]

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Oct 30, 2006, at 22:33, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> The CSS community has requested a <date> or <time>
>> element because they want to restyle dates and times according to  
>> locale.
> 
> I tend to think that this has huge potential for people getting  
> confused and missing appointments. Time zones are impractical and  
> confusing enough without DWIM changing them.

   I support the <time> element for the opposite reason, in fact. I
don't want to see authors styling the date format. I'd rather see the
date format localized or customized to a user preference. If the author
wants it in a specific format, they can use CSS to style the element in
such a way as to show its contents:

HTML:
| <time datetime="YYYY-MM-DD">(*)???MMMM;YY;D???(*)</time>

CSS (using css3-content):
| time { content: contents; }