[microformats-discuss] FYI: Boyd on Microformats and Structured Blogging

[Craig Ogg]

Tantek,

On 10/10/05, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> On 10/10/05 4:26 PM, "Craig Ogg" <craig.ogg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In that same article, Stowe Boyd says,  "Turns out I just had a
> > conceptual problem: I was thinking that dtend worked differently. If
> > an event is intended to run on 15 Nov, without a tipulated hour of
> > ending, then you should encode dtend as 16 Nov!)"
> >
> > If he is correct, this seems to me to be a violation of the "human
> > first, computers second" principle.
>
> I'm not sure I understand how you came to that conclusion.  Could you
> explain a little?

[snip]

> This message is short and to the point:
>
> <http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/ietf-calsify/2005-September/000769
> .html>

I recognize the date convention from SQL -- essentially there is an
invisible time component of 00:00:00.  This is probably one of the
most common sources of bugs in SQL queries -- it just doesn't make
sense to most people.  More importantly, to readers of the page the
tooltip actually seems to disagree with what author wrote.  "Which is
it???"  Even as a programmer, this was my immediate reaction.

I understand this is being done to not reinvent the wheel, I just
thought I would point out that it is problematic and will likely
result in a lot of incorrect markup.  Part of the problem is people
see "dt" and pronounce it "date" rather than "datetime" which is what
it probably stands for.  Perhaps creating new classes "datestart" and
"dateend" (no time component allowed) and stating that dtstart and
dtend should state the time component would remove the ambiguity.  I
don't think that solution is ideal either though.

Craig