<date> is a generic element that contains a month, day, and/or year in any format. It should be used for dates which merit encoding and do not fall under <unitdate>. It may be entered as text or numbers and as a single date or range. The NORMAL attribute may be used to facilitate machine date reading and comparison, using YYYYMMDD, etc.
A standard numeric form of the date (YYYYMMDD, etc.) can be specified with the NORMAL attribute to facilitate machine comparison of dates for searching, for example, 19480101/19980401 (YYYYMMDD/YYYYMMDD), or 1948/1998 (YYYY/YYYY). The TYPE attribute can be used to supply a more specific designation, for example, “life,” “flourish,” “depiction,” “publication,” or “acquisition.” The CERTAINTY attribute may be used to indicate the degree of precision in the dating, for example, “circa,” “approximately,” or “after.” The CALENDAR attribute, which has a default value of “gregorian,” specifies the calendar from which the date stems. The value “ce” (common or Christian era) is the default for the ERA attribute.
<date> may be used within <change>, <chronitem>, <creation>, <entry>, <event>, <extref>, <extrefloc>, <imprint>, <item>, <label>, <legalstatus>, <p>, <physdesc>, <physfacet>, <publicationstmt>, <ref>, <refloc>, <subtitle>, <title>, <titlepage>, <titleproper>, and <unittitle>.
Attributes
- ALTRENDER – not required. Use if the content of the element should be displayed or printed differently than the rendering established in a style sheet for other occurrences of the element.
- AUDIENCE – not required. Use to set whether the element’s contents will be visible to external users or to internal ones. Possible values are: “internal” and “external.”
- ID – not required. Creates an ID for element. Can be used for linking.
- CALENDAR – not required. Default value is “gregorian.”
- CERTAINTY – not required. May be used to indicate degree of precision used in dating—”circa,” “approximately,” “after,” etc.
- ENCODINGANALOG – not required. May contain information to map this tag to a particular element in another schema.
- ERA – not required. May be used to indicate the era in which the date falls. Default valus is “ce” for “Common” or “Christian” era.
- NORMAL – not required. A standard numeric form of the date used for machine reading and comparison, i.e. YYYYMMDD, YYYY/YYYY, etc..
- TYPE – not required. May be used to specify the type of date, such as “creation,” “publication,” etc.
Subelements
<date> may contain PCDATA, <emph>, <extptr>, <lb />, and <ptr>.
Examples
<chronlist> <chronitem> <date normal="19930217">February 17th, 1993</date> <event>Married to James E. Harris</event> </chronitem> <chronitem> <date normal="1995/1998" certainty="approximate">about 1995-1995</date> <event>Employed at the Shady Acres retirement home as a nurse's aid.</even> </chronitem> </chronlist> |
