On 11/7/11 7:53 PM, Arthur Clifford wrote:
I don't know where to draw the line between what units should be supported
and which shouldn't and I doubt the team at W3C want to have to make that
choice either. And given that I can see the logic of a data tag.
I'm not sure the W3C is the channel to try to get something like this
implemented though. I think we'd need to inspire a user-agent developer to
implement the desired behavior and then the W3C if it deemed ti worthy would
add it to the spec. Ian has said on multiple occasions that he is trying to get
a spec that the user agents will use. So, that implies new tech be developed
and then standardized/specified after the fact.
Whether they should add something to the spec or not gets back to the
fundamental question of what HTML is and isn't?
I was impressed by the problem space that InkML attempted to solve in
their specification.
It has sufficient units for scientific precision of time, force and
sample rate, a basic interoperation section for MathML and both an
archive and streaming modes.
If you're looking for sheer accessibility, tables are not fun to work
with, but aria-activedescendant, Semantic HTML and other standard
techniques should work fine.
Earlier in the thread I commented about switching to an ARIA hack
role="time definition" -- I call it a hack because "time" does not exist
in ARIA and so "definition" is the standard role. That hack works today
in ARIA aware software, it is easily identified by spiders and scrapers
and it doesn't require any particular consent from any editor, user
agent or consortium.
For passive tagging of events, ARIA and HTML (metadata or not) are
sufficient for expressing time.
If you're looking at something more advanced, like high precision
metrics, it makes sense to branch out into other W3C specs.
FWIW: I'm not against <time>, the tag is still present on schema.org,
and I'm a big SQL fan, where timestamptz (timestamp with timezone) lives
in a real-way.
HTML5 has one single editor, I suggest using other means, such as ARIA
roles with fallback or the itemprop attributes, at least in those areas,
you won't be blocked by the decisions of one person.
-Charles
