Use time markup in colophon #759
Conversation
This defaults years to be within <time> tags, which will automatically work for everything published after 1000. It also adjusts prepare_release to add the ISO datetime to the colophon “released on” field.
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I had been thinking about proposing this a while ago. Nice! |
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OK, I think we can do this; but we will of course have to update the corpus. That might be tricky... we can assume any string of 4 digits is a year, but what about low or BC dates like in Epictetus or odd formulations (also Epictetus)? Then, we will have to calculate the ISO timestamp of the actual release date, this will have to be scripted a one-off update. I think updating the corpus will be the actual hard part here. Lastly we need to update |
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Let’s reiterate this once more: I really don’t mind if you decide that the value isn’t there and we don’t want to do this. |
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I think it's consistent with the project goals so it's worthwhile. Updating the corpus will be work. I also wonder if we can add a lint check for this that somehow ignores odd constructions or year ranges like in short fiction collections. Note that I think it should be possible to create an ISO timestamp of a BCE date; the years would just be negative. See https://www.tondering.dk/claus/cal/iso8601.php However whether or not that will be validate is an open question, you can try running it through an HTML validator to see. |
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So, I’d tried negative numbers before, but got errors in the validator and dismissed it as non-spec-compliant. But I‘ve just realised that I didn’t know that years needed to be padded to four digits with zeros, and trying I had considered lint checks, but I figured that, to start with at least, if we have the I will probably need to update the examples in the manual’s “Colophon” section. And it might be worth adding something about how to complete the |
This defaults years to be within
<time>tags, which will automatically work for everything published after 1000. It also adjustsprepare_releaseto add the ISO datetime to the colophon “released on” field.I knocked this together in 20 mins, so if you think it’ll be too much work for not enough value to update the corpus, let’s close it, no harm done 🙂