[whatwg] Issues relating to the syntax of dates and times

[Pentasis]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Hickson" <ian at hixie.ch>
To: "Pentasis" <pentasis at lavabit.com>
Cc: <whatwg at lists.whatwg.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 10:52 PM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Issues relating to the syntax of dates and times


> On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, Pentasis wrote:
>>
>> "The primary use cases for these elements are for marking up publication
>> dates e.g. in blog entries, and for marking event dates in hCalendar
>> markup. Thus the DOM APIs are likely to be used as ways to generate
>> interactive calendar widgets or some such."
>>
>> I agree with this, so disregard my previous remarks on this subject. I
>> would however recommend dropping the word "primary".
>
> I wouldn't want to make people think their particular use case was
> excluded. What if someone wanted to use a date to indicate the time an
> entry was added, for instance? Hence the word "primary".
>
> That whole paragraph might be rewritten in due course though to not refer
> to use cases (I try to keep the spec clear of actually using the term
> explicitly and instead just show the use cases in examples).
>
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

This confuses me again ;-) Sorry.  Are you saying that examples and 
use-cases will be excluded from the spec? If so, than I disagree with it 
again. Like I stated before, I understand that times/dates are never *exact* 
(esp. very old ones). So either this element should get a limited use-case 
(like blog entries, calendar dates for meetings etc.) or should be able to 
handle all time/date use-cases (even fictional ones). Either way, this 
should be explicitly defined or excluded in the spec. shouldn't it?

Bert