[whatwg] Dates BCE

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Aryeh Gregor<Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Jim O'Donnell<jim at eatyourgreens.org.uk> wrote:
>> I think Google News Timeline is worth mentioning here as an application
>> which already does this
>> http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
>> It shows
>> events going back to the late Middle Ages. I'm not sure how they've harvested the dates from wikipedia. Perhaps by using microformatted dates?
>
> Probably by looking at the category markup Wikipedia uses, which is
> specific not only to MediaWiki but the particular decisions of the
> English Wikipedia editing community.  <time> certainly wouldn't help
> here -- this application doesn't need a way to say "this text string
> denotes a particular time", but rather "this event happened at this
> particular time".  You need to use Microdata or RDF or such for that
> kind of relationship semantics.

Nod - automated mashups of that kind are outside of the ability of
<time>, even if extended to handle those dates.  It seems that the
useful things to do are:

* directed mashups, where you can manually point an app at particular
dates that you catch across the web and automatically slurp them.

* more reliable temporal searching, at least for pages that include
this kind of markup.  Rather than just searching using "2000 BC" or
whatever and hoping that the target page includes that phrase, the
search engine could  also take note of manually encoded times and use
these to help filter the returned results

~TJ