Hello everyone,
This is my first post here. I've also sent it to the antiquist and MCG
lists, and have been asked to repost it here. Apologies if you've seen it
already; but please feel free to repost it elsewhere.
Having led deployment of microformats on Wikipedia, and in doing so having
discovered several issues with the marking up of historic (especially
pre-Gregorian) and "fuzzy" ("circa", "flourished", "Georgian", "Jurassic",
etc.) dates as metadata, I'm now involved in efforts to gather evidence in
support of the use of such values in the new <TIME> element in HTML5
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html5>), at:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Time_element
especially the sections:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Time_element#Fuzzy_dates
&
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Time_element#Calendar_scale
Without such evidence, then the new element will not include the facility
to mark up such dates in a machine-readable form.
I urge people to view the issues listed there; and the prior discussions
linked at the foot of that page. If you can supply evidence of such dates
being published (a no-brainer in this sector, surely!), existing schemas
for doing so, or use-cases for how user agents (browser tools, other
websites, search engines) could process such metadata, so much the better.
If anyone's reticent to do so there, I'm happy to receive suggestions by
email, either on this list or directly; or via Twitter.
I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have.
Best wishes,
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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