When I considered it further, I realized that the farthest you can be from any Christmas is 366 days, and so with some thought, there is a known range. I think the article might be better served if this is explicitly noted, because meter will not work with just any countdown, such as a countdown to a specific, non-reoccurring date. “December 25, 2009 is in 30 days!” is not a correct usage of meter: until the date of the creation of the universe is known, there is no maximum of the number of days you can be prior to December 25, 2009 that can be known. Furthermore, if the sentence happened to be further semantically marked up, with “Christmas” being wrapped in either an hcal date format or a <time> as the specific Christmas being referred to, the usage would become incorrect.

In fact, since a specific date can be inferred from the number of days indicated, it could be argued that “Christmas” in your example does indeed refer to a specific date, and then your example would be incorrect again. If you want to keep the example, you might want to disambiguate it, by saying something like “A Christmas is in 30 days!”…

My head hurts. The point is that <meter> should really just be reserved for indicating clear fractions and percentages with a very clear and definite maximum and minimum.

@Cennydd Thanks for that. It never occurred to me.

<meter min=0 high=100 max=101 value=...>

…and use “101″ as the “beyond 100″ value, but it’s a bit of a hack.

@Cennydd, yeah that’s a good point about being able to go over 100%, you got any thoughts on which element would be more appropriate?

Maybe Hixie would like to comment on what should happen in this instance, or what element he’d use, though he said above it’s the perfect example?

Minor point which doesn’t detract from a great post, but I suppose it does reinforce the need to look carefully at the variables involve to assess whether they are open or not.

Thank you, I’m learning a lot.