last-modified-brainstorming

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Revision as of 00:22, 30 December 2005 by RobertBachmann (talk | contribs) (2nd strawman proposal)
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"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

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

See datetime-design-pattern.


Proposal (2nd, strawman)

Purpose

Many web pages (and parts thereof) state there publication and/or modification date in a human readable way. This proposed microformat specifies how this can be done in a fashion that is both human- and machine-readable.

Specifying the date of publication

The date of publication is enclosed by <abbr class="date-published1" title="Date in ISO format">Date in arbitrary format</abbr>, e.g:

<p>Published on <abbr class="date-published1" title="2005-12-29T14:39:12+0100">Thursday, December 29, 2005 02:39:12 a.m.</abbr>.</p>.

Specifying the date of modification

The date of modification is enclosed by <abbr class="date-modified1" title="Date in ISO format">Date in arbitary format</abbr>, e.g:

<p>Last modified on <abbr class="date-published1" title="2005-12-29T14:39:12+0100">Thursday, December 29, 2005 02:39:12 a.m.</abbr>.</p>.

If no date of modification is present the parsers MAY use the date of publication as the date of the last modification.

<del> and <ins>

Authors MAY also use <del> and <ins> to denote the date of modification, e.g: <del class="date-modified1" datetime="2005-12-29T14:39:12+0100">wrong words</del>. The class value "date-modified1" is implied for every <del> and <ins> element which has an datetime attribute.

Multiple dates in a page (or a part thereof)

If multiple dates of publication are present on a page (or a part thereof) the youngest date SHOULD be interpreted as the date of publication.

If multiple dates of modification are present on a page (or a part thereof) the oldest date SHOULD be interpreted as the date of modification.


1 This class name is just a placeholder which will be replaced once we know a suitable name.

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