[whatwg] Dates BCE

[Mike Shaver]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Tab Atkins Jr.<jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Mike Shaver<mike.shaver at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Can the historical-timeline community perhaps work with a microformat
>> for such things, so that we can standardize on the basis of experience
>> using the technology in the field, rather than on speculative uses?
>
> I'd actually advise against trying to push this to the Microformats
> group.  They're about marking up visible data in such a way that a
> machine can parse it.
>
> This discussion so far seems to be about taking a visible date (or
> date range, possibly fuzzy) in an arbitrary calendar, and marking it
> up with an invisible date in the proleptic gregorian calendar, with
> support for ranges and fuzziness.

I guess it's somehow useful to express this information to machines
but not to humans, but sure -- I don't care if it's done with
microformats or morse code.  Can someone build and experiment with
this to see if it's as useful as we're speculating, and if it requires
standard rather than standard-based library support, before we make
all browser and other developers bake it into their software?

Mike