Time, we can all agree, is an incredibly useful concept, unfortunately the
recent decision to drop <time> from the HTML5 spec is not useful.
After all every website that I’ve recently developed has made use of the
<time> element, inside <article>, making publish dates something that hold
semantic meaning in relation to the <article> in question.
The decision to remove it has been wholeheartedly rejected by the developer community.
Along with a new website, http://whynotime.com/, and a trending hashtag #occupyhtml5
Github and Twitter both use the <time> tag extensively, it seems to me to be
incredibly short sighted to remove such a useful element and replace it with
something vague and totally meaningless, <data>. <data> can contain anything,
and has no meaning to the <article> in question.
It seams like a real step backwards to the days of endless <div> and <span>
elements, except this time endless <data> elements with all sorts of
meaningless data within, holding no semantic value whatsoever.
I can only hope that the W3C reverse this decision for the good of the HTML5 spec.