[whatwg] Expanding datetime

[Ernest Cline]

-----Original Message-----
>From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi>


>
>The historic astronomy case seems awfully narrow to justify making  
>native date widgets deal with BCE dates.

Native date widgets already need to deal with BCE dates at the DOM level as they
are well within the range of a DOMTimeStamp.  In ECMAScript the range of years for
which any time in the year can be represented is from 283,459 BCE to 287,398 AD.
What is being proposed is allowing a document to specify such times in the document
without having to resort to scripting by expanding the range of values the datetime
attribute can represent.

The draft is already proposing making changes to the existing HTML 4 specification
of datetime by allowing only the date or the time to be given instead of the full
date and time, so datetime is already being proposed to be changed, so the question
therefore is not should we change datetime, but rather what other changes would 
be worth incorporating so as to avoid having to change datetime a second time.  
(For instance, since DOMTimeStamp uses a millisecond granularity, allowing datetime
to specify milliseconds may be of use as well.)