[whatwg] Dates BCE

[Jim Jewett]

> Orthodoxy has it that there is no use case for marking up an ancient date
> or "fuzzy date" like "June 2009" using <time>. I disagree, and this has
> been discussed many times before. Do you have any concrete use cases or
> examples of how marking these up using <time> would be necessary?

Whether or not it is useful, wikipedia does it -- a fair number of
4-digit numbers are linked to a page of "things that happened this
year", but those pages are far from complete -- they often don't even
include the events being linked from.

In theory, that could be done with a span and a class ... but the ad
hoc solutions have clearly been found wanting.

I would sometimes like to search on a date range, as opposed to a
specific date; right now, I'm not sure how to do that cross-domain; if
there were a "time" element, I would expect it to be used often enough
that time searches would be more reasonable.

These may all fail to the 80% rule, but ... they are of at least some
utility, and I'm not sure how much harder it is to support them, given
that <time> will exist, and parsing rules already have to be aware of
such dates to the extent of figuring out what to do for
error-processing.

-jJ