[uf-discuss] Date of Death in hCard

[Andy Mabbett]

There having been no comments, much less objections, I intend to proceed 
with this, using "died" as the property name, in five days from the time 
of posting.

In message <JAxoJkdPuYbGFw6f at pigsonthewing.org.uk>, Andy Mabbett 
<andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk> writes

>
>There has been some previous discussion:
>
>  <http://microformats.org/wiki/vcard-suggestions#Deceased>
>
>of adding a "Date of Death (DoD)" field to hCard, but no development
>work.
>
>I propose that we adopt one, immediately.
>
>IMPORTANCE
>
>Date of death is important in many ways:
>
>   *    It is a flag that the subject is deceased - but is more specific
>        than a "deceased", "dead" or other tag (which may not even be in
>        English).
>
>   *    It is significant in genealogy
>
>   *    It differentiates between two people of the same name, born on
>        the same day.
>
>   *    When a user agent offers the ability to generate an iCal for the
>        subject's birthday, it will allow the user-agent to warn that
>        the birthdays will not occur or to simply decline to do so; or
>        to alternatively generate a differently-worded "anniversary of
>        birth" iCal.
>
>   *    It allows user agents to calculate the subject's age at death
>        (where Date of Birth, DoB, is known)
>
>In short, it offers additional semantic richness.
>
>
>EVIDENCE
>
>There are a plethora of DoDs published on the web; not least in almost
>every Wikipedia biography for a dead person; Google finds about
>1,520,000 for "died on" alo.
>
>
>NAMING
>
>The hCard DoB property is called "bday". A DoD property could therefore
>be called "dday", or perhaps "dod", "death" or "died".
>
>
>BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY
>
>   *    The addition of DoD would be fully backwards- compatible.
>        Parsers (and publishers) may simply ignore it. Parsers which
>        recognise it would simply ignore it when exporting vCards.
>
>   *    Its use would require a small change to the existing boilerplate
>        wording:
>
>                using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426 [URL)
>                properties and values in semantic XHTML.
>
>        to something like:
>
>                using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426 [URL)
>                properties and values, with additional properties, in
>                semantic XHTML.
>        or
>                using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426 [URL])
>                properties and values, with an additional property for
>                date of death, in semantic XHTML.
>
>        (A future modification of vCard may choose to implement a
>        matching DoD field; however, this is outside the control of the
>        microformats community, and vCard development appears to be
>        stagnant. )
>
>   *    All current hCard documentation would remain valid, even before
>        being updated.
>
>PROPERTIES
>
>The field's properties should be identical to those for "bday".
>
>
>REQUEST FOR COMMENTS
>
>Is there any reason why DoD should not be included in hCard?
>
>Are there any preferences for the property name?
>
>Are there any preferences for the boilerplate wording?
>
>
>NEXT STEPS
>
>As soon as a property-name is agreed, I propose to ask Mike Kaply to
>kindly parse an hCard DoD field in Operator, and to seek agreement on
>Wikipedia-EN to include DoD in biographical infobox templates (such as
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_biography>, of which
>there are already over 5,000 deployments alone).
>
>Parser authors may then wish to write code to calculate a subject's age
>at death (and, indeed, the age of living subjects); and to export
>"anniversary of birth" iCals (and, indeed, iCals for birthdays for
>living people)


-- 
Andy Mabbett