[whatwg] <time> element feedback

[Martin Janecke]

Am 31.08.10 02:35, schrieb Ian Hickson:
>> #2 Restyling dates
>> As others have already mentioned, in Japan it’s common to display
>> dates as 20-8-2010, 2010-8-20 and 2010年8月20日. In addition there’s this
>> fun alternative year system that’s still widely used, including in
>> official documents such as driver’s licenses, based on eras. Currently
>> it’s the 22nd year of the Heisei era; 平22年8月20日. As in Hixie’s example
>> of allowing dates to be restyled to follow user conventions, it would
>> also be very useful to allow this for year and year-month dates, as
>> even Japanese people have difficulty converting between the two
>> systems, especially for anything before they were born. Allowing year
>> and year-month @datetime values would allow a browser to offer
>> localisation of date display including conversion between these two
>> date formats. For example:
>>     <time datetime="1935">昭9年</time>
>> could be automatically restyled to
>>     <time datetime="1935">1935</time>
>> (that’s the ninth year of the Shōwa era btw ;)
>
> This is an interesting point. I've made a note of this in the spec, so
> that once CSS actually supports rerendering dates (i.e. once we've proven
> that this all works in the first place for the dates and times common to
> most cultures) we can add this too.
>
>     http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=5405&to=5406

I understand that it's not good to implement features that won't be used 
by anyone in the end. Nevertheless I am worried that this could lead to 
a chicken or the egg dilemma, i.e. HTML waits for CSS to implement 
styling (year-only) dates and CSS waits for HTML implementing 
year-only-dates before making them stylable?

I also wonder whether this needs to be handled by CSS? I think browsers 
could show a tooltip just like Opera shows a tooltip displaying the URL 
for links. Some browsers also use a status bar at the bottom to show 
this otherwise hidden data. It would be great if browser developers 
could give their opinion on this!