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Dear editors, a comment in the source code says, you don't know, if Nero's birth date is given in Julian or Gregorian calendar. So please don't state it as a fact which might be taken over by others. Otherwise we come to the age of internet falsedom, a growing weed where something written from an "authority" is taken as the truth without checking properly. Facebook or Twitter would be fine for that. Say either: if it would be Julian, it would be like that in Gregorian, or if it would be in Gregorian, it would be like that in Julian. So go both ways and you might find someone in the history department, who can put it right for the next edition. Or use the emperor "Nelix from Galactix" as an obvious fiction figure and make up a birth date in the Julian calendar and translate it into Gregorian. Yeah, I know it might not be a big thing, but I also count the peas that I put into my soup. ;-)
The comments in the spec are just comments made by the editors to themselves. There's no point in changing a comment to say something other than what the original writer of the comment wrote it to say. We don't ensure the accuracy of those comments. Whether they're wrong or right is not material to the spec.
My comment actually targeted the visible text in the spec, not the comment. If the facts are unknown to the authors, they should mark it as an example that might be not precise instead of letting it look like a fact, since they talk about a person of history and W3C specs might be seen as reliable sources in some centuries in future. I found another comment. That seemed to be ignored at that time too. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Apr/0376.html So it does look like I am not the only one who is concerned about the wording of that paragraph. But if you like to keep it that way, fine with me. In my translation I will put a comment then, so that at least the readers of the translation know, that it is not a known fact by the editors and that it could be different. Not a shame for editors of a technical spec not to know everything about history, since that matter might be a subject of intense research for centuries of many people.
(In reply to Stefan Schumacher from comment #2) > I found another comment. That seemed to be ignored at that time too. > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Apr/0376.html Actually it wasn't ignored at all. It was discussed in bug 12489 and Hixie already resolved it as wontfix. So this bug is just as duplicate of that already-resolved bug, as far as I can see. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 12489 ***
Ok, the spec will keep it as a fact, the translation will keep it as a fact, but my comment will state it as a "non fact and whoever is interested should research further". That goes well with Hixies comment: We're not writing a historical treatise here, it's an example. So I clearly say in my comment it is an example while the spec treats it as a fact. I still disagree not to give the slightest hint, that it is maybe not historically proven. But there are more important things to do. (Same Hixie might have thought and was too caught up in more important things in means of the HTML5 spec than bothering about this.)