[whatwg] Historic dates in HTML5

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <49B58C3D.5000802 at lachy.id.au>, Lachlan Hunt
<lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> writes

>Bruce Lawson quoted Andy Mabbat:

Mabbett; as below.

>> Andy Mabbett has already listed use cases
>>
>http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-February/018639
.html
>> ...
>> They can be mapped visually on a "SIMILE"
>>
>>   <http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/>
>>
>> or similar time-line.
>
>It's not clear how such a timeline would make use of the time element
>and I couldn't find any use of microformats on that page.  Could you
>please elaborate on the relevance of that page in regards to this
>issue?

Neither of us claimed that that site is using microformats (though there
is no reason why it could not do so).

It was given as evidence that people are publishing historic,
non-Gregorian , BCE and low-granularity dates "in the wild"; and as a
use case for parsing sets of such dates found on other pages.

Furthermore, such timelines can be created from pages which publish
microformats (and which could thus use <time>).

An example of a tool to generate a SIMILE timeline from a page with
hCalendar microformats is:

        <http://www.siatec.net/timeline/>

and a simple timeline generated using that tool, by parsing the
microformats on:

        <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(2008_TV_series)>

is:

        <http://www.siatec.net/timeline/index.php?hcal=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSurvivors_(2008_TV_series)>

        (aka <http://is.gd/mGJm> )


-- 
Andy Mabbett