[uf-discuss] Date of Death in hCard

[Andy Mabbett]

In message
<294B63D734544B438995226DBD3ABAF602D83D3F at CTSPITDCEMMVX03.cihs.ad.gov.on.
ca>, "Rickards, Julian (NDM)" <julian.rickards at ontario.ca> writes

> John Beales wrote:
>
>> This is an interesting idea - the modular approach.  This way we could
>include not only a death date, but a place as well.
>> Eventually this could be added to bday too, (it may be a trick to make
>it stick to the vcard - but that's a challenge for later).
>> Having birth and death dates and places would be very useful for
>geneological and historical applications, although perhaps it's
>> getting outside the realm of hCard and getting into hBio or something.
>
>Also, Ciaran McNulty wrote:
>
>> I have an interest in genealogy so would like to see a way of getting
>things like place of birth, marriage dates/locations/spouses
>> into the format too (date-of-death of course also fits into this
>usage).
>
>
>I wonder if these ideas fit better into a hGenealogy microformat than
>hCard?

There's certainly a case for a genealogy microformat, or at least a
microformat which has fields useful to genealogists (apparently,
genealogy is one of the most used areas of interest on the web). It was
discussed some months ago, and became, like many of the discussions
here, moribund:

        <http://microformats.org/wiki/genealogy-formats>

In the meantime not every dead person discussed on a web page is
discussed in a genealogical context. Take for example:

        <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bonham>

I can see no good reason why an historical, almost accidental,
relationship with vCard should stop the hCard on that page from also
including his Date of death (and places of birth and death, for that
matter).

If we were designing hCard today, using the "process", we wouldn't let
vCard restrict us, we'd look at what is being published on web pages,
and treat vCard as just one possible output from parsers, just as we
treat, say, KML and GPX for Geo.


(If anything, I'd rather split hCard into hBio for people; hOrg for
organisations (including companies, rock bands, etc.) and hPlace for
venues, structures and locations - but that's another issue, and the
horse has almost certainly bolted.)

-- 
Andy Mabbett