[whatwg] <time>

[Smylers]

Tom Duhamel writes:

> My opinion is that all the following dates are precise:
> 2009
> 2009-03
> 2009-03-09
> 
> The later is more precise, but the three are all precise in my
> opinion. 

Being precise means having a small granularity.  Obviously that's
subjective, but in many cases granularity of a year would be deemed
quite large.

> There are numerous reason to use dates which are not very precise, but are
> still precise nevertheless. I'm going to release the new version of my
> current project in <time datetime="2009-04">April</time> but I cannot tell
> as of now the exact day of the release.

Indeed, that's a reason to use an imprecise date in that paragraph of
text.  But it isn't apparently why that date needs to be marked up as
such; what consumers of the above HTML would do something useful with
it?

> On the other hand, those are NOT precise dates:
> Last year
> About a month ago

That's considerably more precise than "2009", in that it bounds a much
smaller period of time than a whole year.  But I don't see how any of
this is revelant; the date support that HTML 5 needs is that which is
generally useful, not something that happens to meet either your or my
definitions of particular terms.

> From my understanding of the current draft, the earlier date that can
> be used is 1970-01-01.

I think you're mistaken.  The <time> definition requires a valid date or
time:

  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-time-element

The date component of which must be a valid date string:

  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#valid-date-or-time-string
  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#valid-date-string

Which must start with a valid month string:

  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#valid-month-string

Which has the constraint year > 0.

Smylers