last-modified-brainstorming
"Last-modified" Brainstorming
Purpose
To specify the date when the logical content of a page was last modfied in a visible form which is also machine-readable.
Authors
"Last-modified" Brainstorming
Purpose
To specify the date of publication and the date of modification of a web page (or a part thereof) in a way that is both readable for humans and machines.
Authors
Possible class names
Class name considerations
Class names for the date of publication
- “date”: Dublin Core
- “published”: Atom
- “dtpublished”: As suggested by Paul Bryson for hAtom. See http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-December/002520.html
Class names for the date of the last modification
- “last-modified”: “Last-Modified” used by HTTP 1.0 and 1.1
- “modified”: Dublin Core
- “updated”: Atom 1.0 syndication specification
Different class name for page specific and item specific dates?
For example “page-last-modified” is used to indicate the last modification date of a page and “last-modified” for the last modification date of a specific item*. However, this seems to be not a good idea. Other microformats leave it to the parser to pick the scope of the element, e.g. rel-tag.
See http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-August/000726.html for a related discussion.
* This specific item is marked-up with a microformat, e.g: a microformat to describe blog posts may use “last-modified” to indicate when a blog post was last modified.
Possible date formats
Possible date formats
Every date format which can be used with datetime-design-pattern can be used with “last-modified”
Theoretical example
This page was last modified 13:26 UTC, 15 Aug 2005.
could be written as
This page was last modified <abbr class="some-class-name" title="2005-08-15T13:26Z">13:26 UTC, 15 Aug 2005</abbr>.
Proposal (strawman)
Purpose
Many web pages are changed after they have been published. Some of them denote the date of the last update of theire logical way in a human readable way (e.g: „Last updated: October 17th, 2005“). The purpose of „last-updated“ microformat is to provide this data in a way which is also machine-readable.
Usage
The date is enclosed by <abbr class="last-updated" title="Date in machine-readable format">.
The machine-readable format is described at http://microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern.
Example
Last updated: <abbr class="last-updated" title="2005-10-17">October 17th, 2005</abbr>
Determining the date of the last update of a page
If one <abbr> element with the class value “last-updated” is present on a webpage the value of the title attribute is to be interpreted as the time the page was last updated.
If multiple <abbr> elements with the class value “last-updated” are present on a webpage the value of the title attribute which represents the most recent date is to be interpreted as the time the page was last updated.