[whatwg] brief question on 2.4.5 Dates and times

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> I am trying to use the specification of Dates and times given in section 
> 2.4.5.

How? That section is just introducing concepts for the rest of the spec.


> I was surprised to find that there is a specification of a valid month 
> string, but not of a valid year string or a valid day string. Is that an 
> oversight?

No, nothing in the spec uses the term "valid year string" or "valid day 
string", so I didn't need to define them.


On Thu, 27 Aug 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> I was trying to find out what restrictions we are putting on the year 
> part of the string. E.g. are we allowing years before the year 0 and 
> how.

In what context? <time>? <input type=date>? <ins datetime>? Something 
else? (The answer is the same for all of them, but the answer is much 
easier to find if you start from a concrete question, and then follow the 
definitions back.)


> It's all there, and it's all fully defined by recursive definition of 
> the parts that are being re-used (e.g. date reuses month (which is 
> month-year, but not just month). However, if you are trying to look for 
> something, it's rather confusing not to have e.g. year and day exposed 
> in the contents, while month is.

If you're looking for something, start at the start. Don't try to 
short-circuit the spec and jump half-way through your answer; if you do 
that you might miss restrictions that apply to particular cases.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'