Timeline

After spending too many hours sorting out date and time issues with my picture collection, I am now concerned with date/time standards.

The standard that WHATWG refers to is ISO 8601. Though in order to read this, I need to buy it. Er, no can do. And it seems to be a withdrawn standard. What’s that all about?

OMG date/time has historically been fecked up in software. Remember Y2K?

In WF2 new date/time controls are introduced as extensions to the input element. Attributes like:

Firstly I am not fond of having several attributes when one element could do. This was proposed by Matthew Raymond (as a format element?) though I think it was shot down by the fact that legacy applications would have to ignore this new data type. Ok so it’s not in the domain of WF2, though we still can’t ignore this major problem of dating data!

Other things I am worried about is:
* Negative dates – useful for faux blogs and games
* Timezones – You always need this! And the WHATWG date/time demo doesn’t have it.

Something must be done to address the temporal values of the Web. Take for example the way currently the date/time of this post is marked up. “July 2005” in a “small” element and “title” attribute. That’s not right.

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