[whatwg] Historic dates in HTML5

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mar 5, 2009, at 13:50, Bruce Lawson wrote:

> And if there is a limit on  a use case, it should be in the spec.  
> There is nothing I can see in the editors draft that limits the use  
> of <time>.

I think that's a spec bug.

> (I use it on my website to markup publication dates of blog entries  
> and comments; why on earth wouldn't I?)

You wouldn't if there's no tangible benefit in sight, i.e. no known  
client app for consuming your markup in a useful way.

> Henri is right: <code>time</code> is pretty much pointless in HTML5  
> if it's not embraced by the microformats community, but why would  
> they embrace it?

They might want to adopt it to avoid accessibility problems with the  
<abbr> design pattern:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2008/06/removing_microformats_from_bbc.shtml

> It prevents them doing a lot of what they do - like fuzzy or ancient  
> dates -  so what do they gain by adopting it?

Are hCalendar entries with fuzzy or ancient dates good for anything?

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