[whatwg] brief question on 2.4.5 Dates and times

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 11:12 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Silvia
> Pfeiffer<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am trying to use the specification of Dates and times given in section
> > 2.4.5.
> >
> > I was surprised to find that there is a specification of a valid month
> > string, but not of a valid year string or a valid day string. Is that an
> > oversight?
>
> Isn't a valid day string just a normal date string?  The month string
> is "month-year", after all, not just "month".
>
> A year string by itself isn't useful in the current spec, as there's
> nothing that would consume it.  <time> uses a date or datetime, and
> the various inputs all use times, dates, weeks, or months.


I suppose it is a matter of taste how to describe this. I'll give you my
impression.

I was trying to find out what restrictions we are putting on the year part
of the string. E.g. are we allowing years before the year 0 and how. I went
into the table of content and wasn't able to find anything about year, but
only about month and date etc. By working backwards from the date, I found
that the "year string" was defined under the "month" paragraph. I was rather
frustrated by that time. Similarly with the format of the "day string" (i.e.
the "day" part of the string, though that was much more obvious.

It's all there, and it's all fully defined by recursive definition of the
parts that are being re-used (e.g. date reuses month (which is month-year,
but not just month). However, if you are trying to look for something, it's
rather confusing not to have e.g. year and day exposed in the contents,
while month is.

As I said - a matter of taste - and possibly usability.

Regards,
Silvia.
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