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Time element accepted: Difference between revisions
Tom Morris (talk | contribs) (→year week only: adding OpenStreetMap example) |
Tom Morris (talk | contribs) (→year week only: removing the no examples bit - there is now one example) |
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:YYYY-WNN | :YYYY-WNN | ||
;use case research | ;use case research | ||
: | :OpenStreetMap's opening_hours tag allows specification of opening hours (of business, shops, parks etc.) by week number. See [http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/40879988 example], [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:opening_hours documentation] | ||
:output equivalent of <code><input type="week"></code>, see [[Time_element#impedance_match_new_date_time_inputs|impedance match new date time inputs]] above. | :output equivalent of <code><input type="week"></code>, see [[Time_element#impedance_match_new_date_time_inputs|impedance match new date time inputs]] above. | ||
;reasoning | ;reasoning |
Revision as of 12:36, 25 February 2013
Summary: Research, data, use cases, issues, and enhancements related to the HTML5 time
element (see also W3C TR time snapshot) that have been adopted in HTML (and HTML5).
HTML5's new <time> element presents a huge opportunity to improve the publishing of datetime information on the web, the biggest opportunity since the introduction of hCalendar and other time-based microformats.
The time element has been improved through the research done on this page.
For other proposals for improving the <time> element, see:
Tantek (and other proposal authors).
year only
- Status
- 2011-11-18 Adopted in WHATWG HTML.
- Summary
- The time element should accept just a year.
- ISO8601 syntax
- YYYY
year only use cases
use case research:
- http://microformats.org/wiki/birthday-examples#year_only
- use cases in VCARDDAV & EDTF - see external links
- Wikipedia 'Start date' template - thousands of YYYY instances
- Wikipedia infobox with YYYY birthdate (unknown MM-DD)
- Copyright notices are often year-only; e.g. that at the foot of [1]
- In biological taxonomy, a species', genus' or other rank's authority (the person who named it, and the year they did so) always includes a whole-year date value. For example:
- Photo date taken
- Flickr supports year and circa dates - "Flickr taken dates come in 4 levels of granularity, exact, year-month, year, and circa."
- Citations from a bibliography which list two or more works by the same author disambiguate them by year
- Commerce
- "a piece of jewellery hallmarked 1933"
- "a 1973 Chevy"
- Sport
- 2008 Olympics
- 1966 World Cup
- Awards
- "1973 Oscar for best film"
- "1988 Nobel Peace Prize"
- Restyling dates for localisation and to follow user conventions
- 2010 to 平22年 to 2010年 (all acceptable ways to represent 2010 in Japan)
- Relative dates in texts: news websites and blogs often use phrases such as
year only discussion
Opinions / discussion:
- +1 Faruk (per Bug 7145 - Valid date strings should accept ambiguous inputs, like "2009" or "2007-01") One example is the very common archive view found on most blogs, which contain distinct links or headers for each year, each month per year, and often each date within a chosen or highlighted month. Currently, the
<time>
element only allows fordatetime
values as precise as a specific day, e.g. YYYY-MM-DD. - -1 Hixie - "Without clear use cases, I don't intend to change the spec here." (ibid)
- +1 Tantek (per HTML5 Super Friends Technical Details: time element)
- +1 Andy Mabbett (Per use cases in VCARDDAV & EDTF - see external links)
- +1 Philip Jägenstedt - for marking up release dates on e.g. MusicBrainz where the date is given as YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD.
- +1 Asbjørn Ulsberg - for marking up years on Wikipedia ("...global military conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945...").
- +1 Glenn Jones - This is often used to format date description for resume's Stackoverflow http://careers.stackoverflow.com/klmr I could list more cases in the wild. Like YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD its part of the http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime profile.
- +1 Oli Studholme This would be useful for semantically marking up years, as in Japan there’s an additional era-based method of representing years (and even Japanese people find it difficult to convert between them), and it would allow the browser to automatically display the user-preferred format. It would also also enable browser-based localisation (adding a 年 after the year). Finally it would be useful for marking up future imprecise dates (e.g. events being planned), allowing someone to add these dates to a calendar automatically (rather than marking up teh events plus manually adding them to a calendar). ref: email to WHATWG
- +1 Martin Janecke - This would be great to mark up relative dates ("next year I will …") that actually refer to an absolute date in the context of the text and the publication date of the text respectively.
- +1 drublic - As input-fields support `year` the datetime-attribute as it is (was until ) should also allow users to define year-only dates. Furthermore it will help making newspapers, wikis and quotations more accessible and semantically powerful.
- ...
Related posts (listed with quotes directly related to year only) :
- 2009-02-23 Dates and coordinates in HTML5 blog post by Andy Mabbett -
hCalendar microformats are already used to mark up imprecise dates (“June 1977″; “2009″). ISO8601 already supports them. Why not HTML5?
- 2009-02-25 HTML 5, politics and me blog post by Bruce Lawson - look for mention of "time element" which mentions:
I see no reason why authors shouldn’t be able to mark up ... dates like ... “1935″ which are currently disallowed by the spec
year only next steps
Per this edit/comment from Ian: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-diffs/2010Aug/0234.html
We need to help create a CSS feature for styling dates to local conventions (e.g. 2000-12-31 vs 31-12-2000 vs 12-31-2000 vs Japanese conventions for year and year-month). Once such a CSS feature exists, it will apparently provide additional weight for including year-only dates in the time element.
year month only
- Status
- 2011-11-18 Adopted in WHATWG HTML.
- Summary
- The time element should accept just a year and a month.
- ISO8601 syntax
- YYYY-MM
year month use cases
- Blog/publishing archive pages - see Benward.me, ablognotlimited.com (need specific links to archive pages)
- output equivalent of
<input type="month">
, see impedance match new date time inputs. - use cases in VCARDDAV & EDTF - see external links
- Wikipedia 'Start date' template - thousands of YYYY-MM instances
- Photo date taken
- Flickr supports year-month dates - "Flickr taken dates come in 4 levels of granularity, exact, year-month, year, and circa."
- Credit/ debit card expiry dates, entered into, then republished for verification on, e-commerce sites (security concerns prohibit use of example URL)
- Restyling dates for localisation and to follow user conventions
- 2010-08 to 08-2010 to 平22年8月 to 2010年8月 (all acceptable ways to represent August 2010 in Japan)
- Relative dates in text: news websites, blogs and statistical institutes often use phrases like:
year month discussion
Opinions / discussion:
- +1 Faruk (per Bug 7145 - Valid date strings should accept ambiguous inputs, like "2009" or "2007-01") One example is the very common archive view found on most blogs, which contain distinct links or headers for each year, each month per year, and often each date within a chosen or highlighted month. Currently, the
<time>
element only allows fordatetime
values as precise as a specific day, e.g. YYYY-MM-DD. - -1 Hixie - "Without clear use cases, I don't intend to change the spec here." (ibid)
- +1 Tantek I think the blog archives use case (where blogs often link to their archives by a specific month and year) is sufficient to justify adding this capability to the time element. Content hosting sites like Flickr also list archives by specific year/month, e.g. see http://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/archives/
- +1 Andy Mabbett (Per use cases in VCARDDAV & EDTF - see external links)
- +1 Philip Jägenstedt - for marking up release dates on e.g. MusicBrainz where the date is given as YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD.
- +1 Asbjørn Ulsberg - for marking up month+year on Wikipedia ("In July 1937, Japan captured the former Chinese imperial capital of Beiping...").
- +1 Glenn Jones - This is the most commonly used format date description for Resume's. Linked-in use it http://www.linkedin.com/in/steveganz and Stackoverflow http://careers.stackoverflow.com/klmr I could list many more cases in the wild.
- +1 Oli Studholme As with the year example above, this would be useful for semantically marking up year-month dates, as in Japan there’s an additional era-based method of representing years (and even Japanese people find it difficult to convert between them), and it would allow the browser to automatically display the user-preferred format. It would also also enable browser-based localisation (adding a 年 after the year, and 月 after the month). Having this data semantically notated would help make the use in Japan of 2-digit years on credit cards and in e-commerce more accessible. Finally it would be useful for marking up future imprecise dates (e.g. events being planned), allowing someone to add these dates to a calendar automatically (rather than marking up teh events plus manually adding them to a calendar). [ref: email to WHATWG]
- +1 Martin Janecke - This would be great to mark up relative dates ("next January I will …") that actually refer to an absolute date in the context of the text and the publication date of the text respectively.
- ...
Related posts (listed with quotes directly related to year-month) :
- 2009-02-23 Dates and coordinates in HTML5 blog post by Andy Mabbett -
hCalendar microformats are already used to mark up imprecise dates (“June 1977″; “2009″). ISO8601 already supports them. Why not HTML5?
- 2009-02-25 HTML 5, politics and me blog post by Bruce Lawson - look for mention of "time element" which mentions:
I see no reason why authors shouldn’t be able to mark up ... dates like “July 2008″ ... which are currently disallowed by the spec
- 2009-03-06 Marking up a blog with HTML 5 (part 2) : Time blog post by Bruce Lawson:
I suggest the spec be amended to allow dates like "July 1966"
- 2009-08-20 HTML 5: what’s hot, what’s not blog post by Bruce Lawson - see section on TIME which explicitly mentions:
The time element is still hamstrung by not being able to markup ... dates like “December 1935″
- 2009-08-30 HTML5 and me blog post by Jeremy Keith - see section on "time" which explicitly mentions
make a piece of information like “April 1912” machine-readable
- 2010-02-09 The time element (and microformats) blog post on HTML5 Doctor by Bruce Lawson - mentions:
The only trouble with <time> is that the [sic] it must contain positive date on the Proleptic Gregorian calendar, meaning you can’t encode a date before the Christian Era. Neither can you encode imprecise dates such as “July 1904″.
year month next steps
Per this edit/comment from Ian: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-diffs/2010Aug/0234.html
We need to help create a CSS feature for styling dates to local conventions (e.g. 2000-12-31 vs 31-12-2000 vs 12-31-2000 vs Japanese conventions for year and year-month). Once such a CSS feature exists, it will apparently provide additional weight for including year-month dates in the time element.
year week only
- Status
- 2011-11-18 Adopted in WHATWG HTML.
- Summary
- The time element should accept just a year and a week number.
- ISO8601 syntax
- YYYY-WNN
- use case research
- OpenStreetMap's opening_hours tag allows specification of opening hours (of business, shops, parks etc.) by week number. See example, documentation
- output equivalent of
<input type="week">
, see impedance match new date time inputs above.
- reasoning
- to provide the output equivalent of
<input type="week">
See impedance match new date time inputs above.
Opinions / discussion:
- +1 Tantek per good design of impedance matching date time inputs.
- ...
month day only
- Status
- 2011-11-18 Adopted in WHATWG HTML.
- Summary
- The time element should accept just a month and a day.
- ISO8601 syntax
- --MM-DD
- use case research
- http://microformats.org/wiki/birthday-examples#month_and_day_only
- use cases discussed in VCARDDAV & EDTF - see external links
- Facebook - allows users to elect to show their birthday as, for example, "17 December", with no year.
Opinions / discussion:
- +1 Tantek (per HTML5 Super Friends Technical Details: time element)
- +1 "radiz" implied support for --MM-DD with the use case question: "How to use <time> with a date in astrology?" in the article http://html5doctor.com/your-questions-answered-6/
- +1 Andy Mabbett (Per use cases discussed in VCARDDAV & EDTF, e.g. birthdays, wedding anniversaries - see external links)
- Portable contacts allows this using a "0000" year value.
- ...