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

[Bob Jonkman]

Approximate dates and ambiguous dates figure prominently in 
genealogy as well.  

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

The GEDCOM data interchange format for genealogical data allows 
approximate dates, specifically "ABT 4 July 1776", "BEF 25 Dec 
1903", "AFT 11 Nov 1918". It also also allows ambiguous dates, "July 
1867" or just "1886", or even "4 July". And these in combination, 
(Approximately ambiguous dates? Ambiguously approximate dates?), eg. 
"BEF Feb 2007", "AFT 1945". The most ambiguous entries I've seen for 
dates are "DECEASED" when date-of-death is unknown, and "NOT 
MARRIED" for couples who have not had a wedding ceremony. (Info from 
Guidelines for event dates in the PAF Help File).


It would be great to see the same syntax formally applied to 
microformat dates, perhaps with the class name "approx" as suggested 
by Toby. 

--Bob.

On 21 Aug 2008 at 14:49, Toby A Inkster wrote:

> > And I've decided to use class="dday" for date of death and
> > class='flourished-start' and class='flourished-end' for flourished 
> > dates
> >
> > 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>
> >
> > Does this look /feel right or am I missing something obvious? Is
> > there established POSH for death date and flourished dates?
> 
> I've previously recommended using 'dday' for date of death. DDAY is 
> the name of the property in the draft vCard 4.0 spec, so it seems 
> likely that any future extension of hCard that does include a date of 
> death will name the property 'dday'.
> 
> 'dday' is already supported in Cognition <http://buzzword.org.uk/
> cognition/>.
> 
> I imagine that your use of 'ca.' in dates will cause problems for 
> some parsers, which expect to find an ISO 8601 date these - it 
> certainly breaks in Cognition. You may be able to improve parser 
> behaviour by using value excerpting:
> 
> <span class="bday">
>    <span class="approx">ca.</span>
>    <span class="value">1575</span>
> </span>
> 
> -- 
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
> 
> 
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