[whatwg] Dates BCE
David Singer
singer at apple.com
Thu Jul 30 09:34:29 PDT 2009
At 11:16 -0500 30/07/09, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> > 1) Machine readability.
>
>This begs the question.
raises the question. begging questions is assuming the answer in the
premise of the question.
>Why do you need machine readability for the
>dates in the Darwin journals? More specifically, why do you need
>machine readability in a standardized fashion currently expected to be
>used primarily for adding dates to calendars?
It allows you to build databases with timelines, that span documents
on the web from diverse sources.
>
>> 2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates.
>
>What form of consistency? Date format consistency? This varies by
>use-case, region, and language. Machine-format consistency? You then
>have to answer why such consistency is important - what does it let
>you *do*?
It would allow you to determine that *this* event reported in an
arabic text with a date referring to a caliphate was actually almost
certainly *before* this *other* event reported in a byzantine text
with a date that is on the indiction cycle. The experts in arabic
and byzantine texts individually might well have the skills to
convert these dates to a uniform day-labelling system, whereas the
interested reader might have the skills in one or the other, but
maybe not both (or perhaps even, neither).
--
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.
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