[whatwg] Element-related feedback

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0800, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

>
> This e-mail is a reply to a number of e-mails on various topics relating
> to the more document-related elements of HTML.
>
> On Mon, 16 Nov 2009, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
>>
>> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/rendering.html#the-time-element-0
>>
>> "When the time binding applies to a time element, the element is
>> expected to render as if it contained text conveying the date (if
>> known), time (if known), and time-zone offset (if known) represented by
>> the element, in the fashion most convenient for the user."
>>
>> This is very vague. Anything which tries to localize the date/time will
>> fail because guessing the language of web pages is hard. Hard-coding it
>> to English also wouldn't be very nice. What seems to make the most sense
>> is using the "best representation of the global date and time string"
>> and equivalents for just time and date that have to be defined. Still,
>> I'm not sure this is very useful, as the same rendering (but slightly
>> more flexible) could be accomplished by simply putting the date/time in
>> the content instead of in the attribute. As a bonus, that would degrade
>> gracefully. Unless I'm missing something, I suggest dropping the special
>> rendering requirements for <time> completely.
>
> The idea is to render the date or time in the user's locale, not the
> page's, though I agree that in some cases that could be confusing.
>
> Maybe we should leave the localising behaviour to author CSS and not do  
> it
> automatically by default?

I think that would be better, yes. Either that or a spec saying exactly  
what string to output for each possible locale. (Making it platform- and  
browser-dependent is just asking for trouble.)

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software