Best accessibility practice? - HTML markup to represent dates

[Andy Dingley]

I'm using this at present:
<p title="Publication date" >[28/09/2005 15:00]</p>

Works fine on screen, but Fangs/Jaws just reads it as "left bracket
twenty-eight slash zero slash two thousand five fifteen colon zero right
bracket" Really it needs something more to indicate that it _is_ a
date.

The [...] brackets would be better done with CSS, :before and content: ,
but the boss wants it to work under IE too. The site is firmly UK
based, so d/m/y is necessary and won't be getting internationalised.

So, what's the best markup for representing a date, with good
accessibility to screen readers?

[Andy Dingley]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 20:54:15 +0100, "Johnny Winther Ronnenberg"
<jo************@XYZtdcadsl.dk> wrote:

Although this tread was fun to read, it seems that no one had the thought,
TB-L, around 2001. Look up "Semantic Web"

why don't we have at a set of
<date><day></day><month></month><year></year><time></time></date> tags?

We do, just not in HTML.

The problem for this original posting (I'm the OP) was not "how to
communicate dates to intelligent machines", because that's largely a
solved problem (if not yet widely implemented). The more specific
problem I had was based on _HTML_ (because I had to do this in a pure
HTML context) and how to communicate to a small set of user agents
(screen readers) so as to improve their behaviour, without breaking the
transparency of the HTML for plain old humans reading on screen.

We can solve the complex case, but not it appears do much to improve the
simple case.

[rf]

Robi wrote:

Johnny Winther Ronnenberg wrote in message news:43*********************@dread11.news.tele.dk. ..

Dr John Stockton wrote:

JRS: In article <43*********************@dread11.news.tele.dk>, dated
Sun, 27 Nov 2005 16:49:18, seen in
news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Johnny Winther Ronnenberg posted :

Both in and out of Europe the following combinations can and do
occur, dd-mm-yy, mm-dd-yy, yy-mm-dd and yy-dd-mm.
Where is yy-dd-mm used, except by mistake?

According to my wife its quit common in Sweden, Norway, France, Spain,
Italy, it dos occur in UK and Germany, as well, as in countries on the South
American continent and from some Asian countries and Australia and in other
countries to.

Never seen it like that in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the UK and Venezuela.
I've never seen it as yy-dd-mm anywhere. The only odd way I had to get accustomed
to is the US way - mm-dd-yy.

I don't know about Asia or Down Under though (sorry Bruce ;-)

I'm not brucie but I can confirm that, in Australia, I have never seen
yy-dd-mm.

I had a look at this a while ago. In the Windows regional settings there
are some regions that use yy-mm-dd, some that use dd-mm-yy, some that use
mm-dd-yy (not just the U S of A). There are none that use yy-dd-mm.

--
Cheers, Richard.

[Stan Brown]

Thu, 1 Dec 2005 23:27:11 +0100 from Johnny Winther Ronnenberg
<jo************@XYZtdcadsl.dk>:

I asked my wife she could not remember whether US passport used one format
or another.

Remember? Why remember, just look at one.

Mine was issued, in its terms, "27 Oct 2004", and my date of birth is
shown in the same format.

People who are claiming yy-dd-mm format don't have much credibility
with me.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
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