Datum element

Problem statement / use cases

• An important feature of HTML is that all contents are basically strings, however authors sometimes need to include non-string data within their documents and even specialized strings
• Without explicit markup for data and strong data typing, users and authors must rely on heuristics or other mechanisms to type data
• Without strongly typing data and giving authors the mechanisms to type data as strongly (or weakly) as they want, machine validation and “checkers” are difficult to implement in a way that helps authors ensure data is entered precisely and accurately
• often data of different types has localizable presentation independent of language (so a user may read a page in a particular language such as en-us, but still expect time or currency numbers to appear in familiar ways)

Proposed solutions

• add a global datatype attribute
• add a datum element (e.g., <d>[a datum]</d> element
• require the datatype attribute on all datum elements
• provide an optional units attribute for datum elements

Note too that the use of an attribute to express datatype semantics on dataum or any other elements facilitates the use of author and user stylesheets for pronunciation based on such datatypes.

Discussion and evaluation

Email

WG members should post feedback and other discussion to the WG’s list serve (the URI for the links below provides date information). Search on this email subject.

See also