[microformats-discuss] International date formats

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 7/26/05 6:20 AM, "Ian Hickson" <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Tantek Çelik wrote:
>> 
>> Parsing a "single normal space character ASCII 32" (rather than just
>> "white space") should be equivalently easy to parsing a "T", and thus
>> since they are equivalent from a computer point of view, you could make
>> the argument that the W3C Note should be extended to permit either since
>> the space is more human friendly.
> 
> Parsing a "T" is a LOT easier than parsing U+0020. Not because parsing
> U+0020 itself is hard, but because when authors think U+0020 is allowed,
> they think U+000A, U+0009, U+000D, U+000C are allowed as well, not to
> mention U+00A0 and a stream of other whitespace characters. And then they
> think that any number of them are acceptable, in any order.
> Implementations then end up all slightly disagreeing about what is
> whitespace and what isn't and pages end up being interpreted differently.
> 
> Whitespace should be avoided like the plague in attributes where
> interoperable results are expected from computers parsing the data.

This is a good argument.  We'll stick with using the T separator as
recommended by the W3C date time note.

> Human consumption is not an issue here anyway.

I want to avoid making this an issue of absolutes.

Human consumption is not as much of an issue here.

We do want to make the date time title reasonably possible for a human to
verify, but don't have to make it "ideally human readable".  That's what the
element contents of the <abbr> are for.

> With a T or with 
> whitespace, we should not be expecting ISO8601 dates to be the final
> presentation form.
> 
>  .date[title] { tooltip: datetime(attr(title)); }

Right.

Thanks Ian.

Tantek