[uf-discuss] RE: Data drift vs. ISO dates WAS Benefits of Microformats

[Belov, Charles]

If you are sick of the ISO date disagreement, you may want to skip this
message.

> -----Original Message-----
> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:09:46 +0000
> From: "Brian Suda" <brian.suda at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] Benefits of Microformats
> To: "Microformats Discuss" <microformats-discuss at microformats.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<21e770780809100609m5834585as56baf70c79377151 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:30 PM, George Brocklehurst
> <george.brocklehurst at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think almost anything you'd like to put into a microformat you
could
>>> make something with a "full" format. hCard.. you could just make a
simple
>>> vCard file. hCalendar? Make an icalendar file you update and link to
it. The
>>> advantage to NOT using microformats is that you can use almost any
>>> application that supports calendar/contact etc information and point
them at
>>> the "full" format instead of the microformat, which requires
consumer
>>> applications to add more functionality.
>>>
>>> To me, that's just the state of things now. I have no technical
reason to
>>> not use them. I just think that if you just make the "full" format,
>>> applications consuming this information are more likely to
support/handle
> 
> --- i think that really needs to be updated. They are missing the
> point of semantic mark-up over flat files completely. Firstly, flat
> files are out-of-sight and therefore out-of-mind. The data drift is
> much more likely than files (HTML) you stare at on a daily basis.

So are abbr tags hiding ISO dates. I can see somebody changing the
publicly visible date and forgetting to change the hidden ISO date. This
of course is not an issue for programmatically generated pages, but it
is certainly an issue for manually-edited ones. (This is also assuming
the content entry person can reliably generate ISO dates and times in
the first place.)

Data drift is a very big argument against using hidden ISO dates, and
human-friendliness is a very big argument against showing them. One more
reason not to use ISO dates.

Hope this helps,
Charles "Chas" Belov
SFMTA Webmaster