

Making the HTML5 &lt;time&gt; element safe for historians - sethg
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_saf.html

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moe
Indeed a very enlightening discussion. Everybody knows this stuff is
complicated but the author does a stellar job in pointing out just how
ridiculously convoluted it really is.

Having a powerful <time> element as the author suggests would definitely be
amazingly useful. Not only for historians but also for us mere mortals. For
example, many web-developers could benefit greatly from being able to perform
simple date arithmetics in markup. All those little time-related tidbits such
as "posted 3 hours ago" or "due in 2 days" have to be computed somewhere and
being able to do that in straight markup instead of the current server-side or
javascript approaches would be an advantage. At the very least it could do
away with many of the timezone and "browser time vs server time" related
headaches that we deal with today.

Anyways due to the massive complexity this would very well deserve to be spun
off into a separate project maintained by specialists, akin to MathML.

But given the track-record of the W3C I fear neither will happen. Instead
we'll get the usual half-baked solution after the usual 5-10 year snail-race.
And then, ofcourse, MSIE will come along and establish a broken parallel
universe...

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ggchappell
This guy has some interesting and worthwhile things to say. However, his whole
discussion seems to be predicated on the idea that, if the specs for the
<time> element were changed appropriately, then _everyone would follow the
official standard_.

A 10-second look at the web tells us this is not going to happen.

So, suppose some document is written indicating how the <time> element works.
What reliable guarantees does that give us concerning the use of the <time>
element on real web pages? Answer: None.

So, nice try, and an interesting article, but I really do not think it's going
to work.

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mshafrir
Very thorough and interesting discussion. When is HTML5 expected to hit
mainstream?

~~~
brodie
HTML 5 is two things: a codification of how browsers parse documents and
handle errors, and a slew of new features for HTML and JavaScript.

The first part is more of a set of guarantees that browser vendors can agree
upon, and I believe it's largely based on IE's behavior.

The new features are already slowly trickling into browsers. For example,
Firefox, Opera, and Safari all implement <canvas>. There are a number of other
features that are already implemented in browsers, which you can read about
here: <http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Implementations_in_Web_browsers>.

So, right now some new features are closer to the mainstream than others,
especially where there are 3rd party implementations for IE (like
ExplorerCanvas, and Google Gears which will probably have HTML5 APIs at some
point). I wouldn't hesitate to play around with these new technologies,
especially at the rate they're being implemented.

