[whatwg] <time>

[David Singer]

At 17:02  +0100 13/03/09, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>I struggle to understand why it is better to ask *authors* to use 
>One True Calendar instead of e.g having a scheme attribute through 
>which the author can specify the date/time format.

You might want to read <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/iso8601.html> 
where it is stated "Automatic processing of data is easier to program 
if dates and times are expressed in a uniform, preferably 
fixed-length notation." Also, you might consider our own 
<http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date> and how much harder it might be 
to represent dates in other calendar systems and languages (Japanese 
is given here) if the source format could vary.

If your alternative format can be converted to other date systems, it 
is highly likely it can be converted to 8601, and then it should be 
at source.  If it can't be converted to other formats, it is way less 
useful as an markup value.

Can we drop this topic?  Apart from suggesting
a) that the fully delimited date format be required (extended format);
b) that year 0000 and before be allowed;
c) that parsing the body text as 8601 may be dangerous if it's 
notated the same way but not (possibly proleptic) Gregorian;

otherwise we don't seem to have made much progress on 'improving' 
this side-line in HTML, despite the rather large volume of posts.
-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.