[whatwg] Historic dates in HTML5

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mar 5, 2009, at 01:29, Jim O'Donnell wrote:

> Is there any suitable markup in HTML5 for dates in digitised  
> documents from museums, libraries and archives?

What would consuming software do with those dates?

The <time> element is meant as a replacement for the microformat  
<abbr> design pattern in hCalendar (if the microformat community  
embraces <time>; if not, <time> in pretty much pointless in HTML5).  
The expected use cases of hCalendar are mainly transferring *future*  
event entries from a Web page into an application like iCal.  
Conceivable, one might perhaps also want to support entries that  
encode the birthday (in the past) of a living person with an annual  
repeat.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/