Indeed a very enlightening discussion. Everybody knows this stuff is complicated but the author does a stellar job in pointing out just how ridiculously convoluted it really is.
Having a powerful <time> element as the author suggests would definitely be amazingly useful. Not only for historians but also for us mere mortals. For example, many web-developers could benefit greatly from being able to perform simple date arithmetics in markup. All those little time-related tidbits such as "posted 3 hours ago" or "due in 2 days" have to be computed somewhere and being able to do that in straight markup instead of the current server-side or javascript approaches would be an advantage. At the very least it could do away with many of the timezone and "browser time vs server time" related headaches that we deal with today.
Anyways due to the massive complexity this would very well deserve to be spun off into a separate project maintained by specialists, akin to MathML.
But given the track-record of the W3C I fear neither will happen. Instead we'll get the usual half-baked solution after the usual 5-10 year snail-race.
And then, ofcourse, MSIE will come along and establish a broken parallel universe...
Having a powerful <time> element as the author suggests would definitely be amazingly useful. Not only for historians but also for us mere mortals. For example, many web-developers could benefit greatly from being able to perform simple date arithmetics in markup. All those little time-related tidbits such as "posted 3 hours ago" or "due in 2 days" have to be computed somewhere and being able to do that in straight markup instead of the current server-side or javascript approaches would be an advantage. At the very least it could do away with many of the timezone and "browser time vs server time" related headaches that we deal with today.
Anyways due to the massive complexity this would very well deserve to be spun off into a separate project maintained by specialists, akin to MathML.
But given the track-record of the W3C I fear neither will happen. Instead we'll get the usual half-baked solution after the usual 5-10 year snail-race. And then, ofcourse, MSIE will come along and establish a broken parallel universe...