[uf-discuss] hcard: born and died and flourished

[Jim O'Donnell]

Hi Michael,

On 21 Aug 2008, at 13:28, Michael Smethurst wrote:

> Where either date is circa I've included ca. in the span with bday,  
> dday,
> flourished-start or flourished-end:
>
> <span class="bday">ca. 1575</span>-<span class="dday">ca. 1614</span>
>


You could represent fuzzy dates as two timestamps seperated by a  
slash, as per
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/pns/pndsdcap/ 
#DctermsTemporalPndstermsISO8601Per

eg. ca. 1575 could be written as 1570-01-01/1580-12-31 or you might  
be able to just get away wth 1570/1580.

I'm not quite sure how you'd represent that in HTML, but it is a  
standard for representing periods of time.

Oh, and I suppose with dates that far back there'll be calendar  
issues with Julian vs. Gregorian and what day does the year begin if  
you get into days and months and comparing dates from different parts  
of Europe. I have to admit I generally ignore those since the  
uncertainty in dates for works of art and the like is usually much  
bigger than any difference introduced by different calendars.

Jim

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