[whatwg] Historic dates in HTML5

[James Graham]

Philip Taylor wrote:

> and make sure their stylesheets use the selector ".time" instead of
> "time", to guarantee everything is going to work correctly even with
> unexpected input values.
> 
> So the restriction adds complexity (and bugs) to code that wants to be
> good and careful and generate valid markup.
> 

On the other hand the python datetime class doesn't seem to support 
years <= 0 at all so consuming software written in python would have to 
re-implement the whole datetime module, potentially causing 
incompatibilities with third party libraries that expect datetimes to 
have year >= 0. This seems like a great deal more effort than simply 
checking that dates are in the allowed range before serializing or 
consuming them in languages that do support years <= 0.