hcard-date-of-death

Date of Death in hCard

Work relating to the proposal to add a "date of death" field to hCard.

This would be of particular, but not exclusive, benefit for hCards used within a genealogy microformat.

Deceased indicator

• There is no way to mark up a person as being deceased - either by a "deceased" flag or date-of-death. A workaround: add the tag/category "deceased". See also mailing list post on tagging for 'deceased'
  • -1 Tantek: I think tags/categories are good enough for now.
  • +1 Andy Mabbett: Tags are often not appropriate, as per the cited e-mail. DoD is more specific (and often used in real life biographies and obituaries e.g van Gogh on Wikipedia). Note also Wikipedia's Persondata which aligns very closely with hCard, but has additional date and place of birth & death fields. Andy Mabbett 13:06, 28 Jan 2007 (PST)
  • +1 for date-of-death Ciaran McNulty: Date-of-death is useful information in some applications (specifically genealogy).
  • -1 for 'deceased' flag Ciaran McNulty: Tagging can cover this sort of binary flag.

Date of Death evidence

• All 56,000+ entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Most Wikipedia biographies of dead people (most of those on Wikipedia-EN already use hCard):
  • Walt Disney
  • John Bonham
• Used on cemetery records:
  • Find-a-Grave's Karl Marx
  • Find-a-Grave's Chico Marx
  • Seeing Stars: InglewoodPark
  • Commonwealth War Graves Commission search results (some of the 1.75 million records available)
• Used in obituaries:
  • Tony Norris (West Midland Bird Club)
  • Ivor Cutler (Guardian)
  • Grahame Clark (British Archaeology)
• Used on memorial websites:
  • Missyou.org.uk - Wendy Draper
  • The Last Respect - George Blackett
  • Tribute Times - Heather Jane Ragno-May
  • remembered-forever.org - David Bennett
• Used on war memorial pages:
  • Captain Ronald Wilkinson
  • GenUKI's Skirlaugh War Memorial
  • Roll of Honour.com's Little Wakering
• Used in biographies:
  • Biography.com's (Camille Monet)
  • IMDb's Stan Laurel
  • LastFM's Jimi Hendrix
  • Piano Society's Debussy
  • National Portrait Gallery's Winston Churchill
  • BBC's Winston Churchill
  • International Music Score Library Project's Johann Sebastian Bach
  • Guggenheim Museum: Picasso
  • Discogs: Jimi Hendrix
• Used in artist attributions:
  • National Portrait Gallery's Edward Grey (1862-1933), by Sir James Guthrie (1859-1930)
  • The Tate's Figures in a Garden by Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
• List of saints on Wikipedia

See also: genealogy-examples

New vCard Spec

The draft specification for vCard 4.0 introduces a DDAY property for recording the date of a contact's death. Currently hCard only covers vCard 3.0, but authors are free to use additional class names as desired. So authors may mark up date of death using a "dday" class, but should not necessarily expect parsers to recognise it.

Related pages

• hCard
• hCard cheatsheet - hCard properties
• hCard creator (feedback) - create your own hCard.
• hCard authoring - learn how to add hCard markup to your existing contact info.
• hCard examples - example usage of various classes within hCard.
• hCard examples in the wild - an on-going list of websites which use hCards.
• hcard-supporting-user-profiles - sites with user profiles marked up with hCard - a very common example.
• hCard FAQ - if you have any questions about hCard, check here.
• hCard implementations - websites or tools which either generate or parse hCards.
• hCard parsing - normative details of how to parse hCards.
• hCards and pages - semantic distinctions between different hCards on a page, and how to identify each
• hcard-user-interface - techniques and issues surrounding user-interfaces to author, publish, and display hCards.
• hCard profile - the XMDP profile for hCard
• hCard singular properties - an explanation of the list of singular properties in hCard.
• hCard tests - a wiki page with actual embedded hCards to try parsing.
• hCard advocacy - encourage others to use hCard
• hCard "to do" - jobs to do

The hCard specification is a work in progress. As additional aspects are discussed, understood, and written, they will be added. These thoughts, issues, and questions are kept in separate pages.

• hCard brainstorming - brainstorms and other explorations relating to hCard.
  • hcard-parsing-brainstorming - brainstorming specific to parsing of hCard
  • geo brainstorming
• hCard feedback - general feedback (as opposed to specific issues).
• hCard issues - specific issues with the specification.
• vCard errata - corrections to the vCard specification, which underlies hCard.
• vCard suggestions - suggested improvements to the vCard specification.