hCard history and extensions (was Re: [uf-discuss] Date of Death in hCard)

[James O'Donnell]

On 30 Jun 2007, at 15:11, Jeremy Keith wrote:

> I don't believe that hCard needs to be extended to accommodate a  
> "date of death" field. I think that we already have a microformat  
> to deal with this use case; it just doesn't happen to be hCard.
>
> The dtend field in hCalendar seems like the perfect fit for this.  
> Microformats are intended to be embeddable within one another: an  
> hCalendar within an hCard (or visa-versa, depending on how you look  
> at it) allows for all the desired information to be marked up:
>
> <p class="hcard vevent">
>   <span class="fn summary">Charles Darwin</span> was
>   born on <abbr title="1809-02-12" class="dtstart bday">February  
> 12, 1809</abbr>
>   and died on <abbr title="1882-04-19" class="dtend">April 19,1882</ 
> abbr>.
> </p>

I don't quite understand - I can see that April 19, 1882 is the end  
date of an event, but how do I know that the event in question is the  
life of Charles Darwin? ie. how does a parser figure out that Darwin  
died on 19th April 1882 from the markup above? Is a date of death  
defined as a dtend which has been immediately preceded by a date with  
a class of bday?

I think I'm missing something here.
Jim

Jim O'Donnell
jim at eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens