last-modified-brainstorming

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"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

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.


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.

Related