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

• Robert Bachmann

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*.

• Pro
  • Easy parsing
• Contra
  • See http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-August/000726.html

* 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

• ←last-modified-formats
• datetime-design-pattern