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

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, Pentasis wrote:
>
> But the way it is described now still creates a difference in *possible* 
> markup between:
> 
> The battle of waterloo was fought on <time datetime="1815-06-18">Sunday 
> 18 June 1815</time>
> 
> and:
> 
> Julius Ceasar was assassinated on the ides of march in the year 44BC.
>
> The spec allows us to use the time-element in the first case but not in 
> the second, while the type of information and semantics of the sentence 
> are the same in both cases and both dates are known dates and agreed 
> upon to be true. I can imagine this to be confusing for authors/users.

Could you, for both cases, give the precise number of seconds from the day 
of the event in question until now? My impression is that we would not be 
able to give the precise number of seconds since a date on the Roman 
calendar. For example, were the years after 44BC regular or intercalary?

As I said before, I think before we start supporting other calendars (like 
the Roman calendar, or even the more recent Julian calendar), we should 
support non-Gregorian calendars that are in active use today. But I don't 
propose to do this at this time, as that is an inordinately complicated 
problem and we don't yet know if <time> is going to be widely used or not.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'