[whatwg] Dates BCE

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:01:33 +0200, 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.

It doesn't have to go through the microformats (lowercase m) group. Everyone can invent class conventions if they so desire. In any case, HTML5 also provides Microdata which could be used for this. I very much agree that experimenting with this before standardizing is the right thing to do. (That's how <time> came to be.)


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/