Jeni's Musings

The microdata feature isn’t really meant to do RDF; that it can do it at all is mostly a bonus. The goal was to address a set of use cases that were brought up over the past few months, none of which actually need RDF as far as I can tell. For example, none of the use cases on the list needed data typing at the point of data entry or XML literals, so I didn’t try to find a way to provide those.

Regarding the time thing, I plan to add that typing at some point (since as you say it’s not too hard); I haven’t done it yet mostly because I didn’t want to add the whole date and time parsing algorithm to the microdata-to-RDF conversion algorithm unless it was clear we really needed it, since it pretty much doubles the total complexity of conversion to RDF.

What do RDF processors do when they find an object is a “time” and they expected a “date”? Or when it’s a string and they expected a datetime? (How can I test this?)