last-modified-brainstorming

From Microformats Wiki
Revision as of 15:12, 26 October 2005 by RobertBachmann (talk | contribs) (Proposal (strawman))
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

"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

Possible class names

General class name considerations

  • “last-modified”
    • + “paveing the cowpaths” (“Last-Modified” used by HTTP 1.0 and 1.1)
    • - HTTP’s “Last-Modified” Header has a slightly different meaning. (Last modification date of the resource, not the last modification date of the resource’s logical content)
  • “last-updated”
    • + New name for a “new” semantic.

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-modfied” for the last modfication date of a specific item*.

* 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

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