EPUB3 fun #5
By glazou on Wednesday 8 August 2012, 15:24 - Standards - Permalink
Dates and time... Dates and time are painful, dates and time are complex, "dates and time are the most complex objects we use on a daily basis" used to say Reuters' Misha Wolf in the HTML WG in the good ol'days.
Excerpt from section 2.2.7 of OPF 2.01:
The
date
element has one optional OPFevent
attribute. The set of values forevent
are not defined by this specification; possible values may include:creation
,publication
, andmodification
.
Excerpt from section 3.4.6 of EPUB Publications 3.0:
The
date
element must only be used to define the publication date of the EPUB Publication.
...
Only onedate
element is allowed.
Ahem... So EPUB3 allows only two dates for a package: the publication date and the last-modification date (through a <meta property="dcterms:modified">
element). It's impossible to preserve the date of creation or various modification dates. Is it only me or this change from EPUB2 to EPUB3 is weird?
Please note that to insert a publication date into an OPF document ready for distribution, you must modify it and rezip the whole package. So if an OPF document does have a <dc:date>
publication element, its content value must be equal to the last-modified date!!! In other terms, this is totally useless. Wow.