Martin,

Thanks for all your thoughts in this matter. I'm not trying to be a
stubborn thorn in the side of reason, more a devil's advocate. So,
acknowledging the risk of beating this near dead horse further...

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Andrea Aime
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Martin Davis <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Two more thoughts in favour of "reduced precision = interval":
>>
>> 1. Expressiveness - If reduced-precision time strings are taken to mean a
>> precise instant, then there is no simple way of expressing a standard
>> interval.  Whereas if reduced-precision is interpreted as an interval, it's
>> still possible to express an instant via a full-precision string.

Agreed. My counterpoint would be that by being explicit, both are
supported. Since software is going to be making the request, the
'expressiveness' argument seems less convincing - the client can
support being expressive whilst still adhering to the protocol. While
making manual WMS requests is a nice option when debugging, how many
folks beyond developers are manually editing WMS parameters to achieve
success in their endeavors? To address the concern about February
being a leap month, most clients would have access to calendar math
and could formulate the appropriate request.

>> 2. Common Usage: When someone says "2012" they typically mean the entire
>> year 2012, not the instant at the start of the year.   Likewise for other
>> reduced-precision expressions of time.  (I realize that standards often
>> don't let reality intrude, but it might be taken into consideration in
>> absence of other clear direction)

Totally and completely agree. The problem as I see it is that to
achieve both 'Common Usage' _and_ adhere to the spec, we introduce a
difference in behavior - if 2012 means all of 2012 excluding
2013-01-01T00:00:00Z but 2012/2013 means _including_ that first day of
the new year (as per the spec), then this would bad™. I again submit
the evidence that in many domains, single increments on a precision
element (e.g. 1 year, 1 month, etc.) are _not_ standard or common
usage (think census data, seasonal weather deviations from norm,
stream gauge-data, weather forecasts, etc.).

hair-splitting standards wonkery(© mdavis), indeed...

Cheers®,
-Ian

>
>
> Agreed this is a sensible approach. Hopefully Justin will be able to find
> some more guidance about this
> with OGC.
>
> The CITE tests are a bit funky, but as far as I remember one has to be able
> to configure precise and non precise
> handling on a per layer basis to pass them, so hopefully there is some test
> checking both ways.
>
> Cheers
> Andrea
>
>
> --
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-- 
Ian Schneider
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.

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