Re: Best accessibility practice? - HTML markup to represent dates

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 20:54:15 +0100, Johnny Winther Ronnenberg wrote:
> Andy Dingley wrote:
>> [snip acccessibility of dates]
>
> Although this tread was fun to read, it seems that no one had the thought,
> why don't we have at a set of
> <date><day></day><month></month><year></year><time></time></date> tags?

You've chosen an interesting combination of specificity here - you're
requiring a division into days, months, and years, even though some
calendars don't break up dates in this fashion, but you don't require a
simiilar division of times into hours, minutes, and seconds.

In line with the general ideas of mark-up something like this would be
better, if it existed:

<p>We'll meet up <time time="20051129">next Tuesday</time> to discuss the
future of HTML.</p>

Here the time element (which could be used to represent a more specific
time than the date given in the example) would have an attribute specifying
an ISO-8601 formatted time, while allowing the page author to write the
time in whatever way they felt suitable.

These are all just ideas for the future, of course.

--
Safalra (Stephen Morley)
http://www.safalra.com/hypertext/
.