[uf-discuss] Human and machine readable data format

[Michael]

>
> Seems to me there are 2 solutions:
>
> 1. relax the data hiding constraint (tricky because it's fundamental to the
> uf design philosophy and it's relaxation has been rejected many times)
>
> 2. maintain the status quo. Keep the abbreviation design pattern for machine
> friendly data and leave it up to publishers to decide if this is an issue
> for them - or not. It would probably need the microformats community to
> promote the design philosophy and potential issues a little higher than at
> present. But the wiki already documents much of this - just a bit more
> prominent linking and  some padding out of /about to be a little more
> neutral.
>   

actually the suggestion of splitting the datetime into date, time and 
timezone marked up in separate elements seems to me like a good compromise.

yyyy-mm-dd would certainly not be as scary for humans as a full datetime 
with timezone
and it would avoid needing to hide data and be much easier to do than 
trying to cope with lots of different date formats or trying to do NLP.

In fact it might even help a human in cases where the "human date" is 
ambiguous!