birthday examples

Examples of birthday publishing practices.

Many social network sites (e.g. those listed in hcard-supporting-user-profiles) provide users the ability to publish their birthday (or age) in some form. This page documents those various forms. Many sites permit different forms depending on individual profile preferences.

This article is a stub. You can help the microformats.org wiki by expanding it. Please look at more sites with hcard-supporting-user-profiles and document how they publish birthdays. Those sites in particular make sense to analyze because they've already shown the desire to use hCard mark-up, thus are likely to adopt any improved bday markup.

date

YYYY-MM-DD

• LiveJournal - e.g. http://daveman692.livejournal.com/profile
• ... please add more examples/links

support status:

• supported by hCard and vCard.

year only

YYYY or age (which implies coarse year info)

• MySpace - e.g. http://www.myspace.com/ciberch
  • only age, not date nor month. essentially equivalent to year.
• last.fm - e.g. http://www.last.fm/user/adactio
  • only age, not date nor month. essentially equivalen to year.
• ... please add more examples/links

support status:

• not supported by vCard - requires full year month day
• can be specified using hCard, see example below.
• hcard-implementations support unknown (need test cases)
• to-do: hCard spec could use clarification in (1.0.1 or 1.1), and how to convert to vCard.
• example, using ISO8601 YYYY format:

  <span class="bday">1955</span>
  

month and day only

MMDD Real world use cases:

• qmpeople - e.g. http://www.qmpeople.com/users/laserion
  • only month and day
• levels4you - e.g. http://www.levels4you.com/forum.l4y?do=view&t=6847&viewfrom=30
  • only month and day - it announces people's birthdays (but not their ages) on the day of (search for "The following member has a birthday today!"), and is thus equivalent to month and day.
• LiveJournal - e.g. http://tantek.livejournal.com/profile
  • permits user-specified preference of only month and day
• ... please add more examples/links

Theoretical use cases (please note URLs if you know of any for these and then move to above section on real world use cases):

• "radiz" is asking for month and day with the use case question: "How to use <time> with a date in astrology?" in the article http://html5doctor.com/your-questions-answered-6/ , specifically for dates like: "13 Apr – 14 May"

support status:

• not supported by vCard - requires full year month day
• can be specified using hCard, see example below.
• hcard-implementations support unknown (need test cases)
• to-do: hCard spec could use clarification in (1.0.1 or 1.1), and how to convert to vCard.
• example using ISO8601 --MM-DD format and value-class-pattern value-title:

  <span class="bday"><span class="value-title" title="--06-08"> </span>6/8</span>
  

• example using ISO8601 --MM-DD format and HTML5 <time> element (how it could work) :

  <time class="bday" datetime="--06-08">6/8</time>
  

related

• hcard-supporting-user-profiles
• hcard-brainstorming (for inclusion into hCard 1.0.1 or 1.1)
• vcard-suggestions
• genealogy
• HTML5