[uf-discuss] Microformats and RDFa not as far apart as previouslythought

[Michael MD]

>The focus seems to have drifted toward smarter parsing of dates, but the 


Sure ... splitting the date into day, month and year could be workable, or
somehow describing a date format in another element, if there is a standard
way to do it and it is easy to do, but I'm opposed to anything that relies
on unreliable heuristics or localisation to parse dates.

There are situations where markup clues used for localisation might be
misleading, such as people using microformats in a post on a site they do
not themselves run that may even be in a different country.
(a shared blogging site that allows html tags in posts would be a good
example here)

If a parser gets even 1% of dates wrong because of localisation errors it
could lead to a lot of people turning up to events on the wrong dates and
I'm sure those people would not be too happy about it. 
So please lets not underestimate the importance of reliable date parsing!

It's already bad enough trying to cope with timezone issues in the real
world (eg people misusing 'Z' in their datetimes)

OK, maybe some aspects of ISO dates are not "human-friendly" enough and we
need to look at this, but dates do still need to marked up in a standard way
somehow!

There is also the issue of parsers becoming slow and bloated.

Yes I know its "humans first" but there are limits. 

If people turn away from using a tool because it is unreliable or too slow
is it really "humans first" then?