Scott Reynen wrote:
I'm assuming by "different calendar," you mean non-Gregorian? If so,
what are the use cases for non-Gregorian dates in hCalendar?
It's not so much the case of wanting to encode non-Gregorian dates in
hCalendar, but wanting to include non-Gregorian dates on the web page.
<abbr class="dtstart" title="2008-07-14">11 Rajab 1429</abbr>
Is '2008-07-14' to be considered an appropriate expansion of the
"abbreviation" '11 Rajab 1429'?
In case anyone is wondering whether non-Gregorian calendars are used
in practice, the Islamic calendar (used in the example above) is the
official calendar for Saudi Arabia, and used in religious contexts in
many other countries; the Julian calendar is still used in religious
contexts by Orthodox Christian churches, and frequently used by
historians to refer to many older dates; the Chinese calendar is used
for various religious and cultural reasons not just in China, but in
some other Asian countries, but not for any official purposes.
I would cite specific pages that use these calendars, but I don't
speak Arabic, Russian or Mandarin, so don't know the correct terms to
Google for.
So there will be cases where people want to publish non-Gregorian
dates, but for interoperability with iCalendar, they'll need to
include a machine-readable Gregorian equivalent date. This is an
example of where you're going to have very significant differences
between the human and machine-readable representations of the same
dates.
(It's also interesting to note that automatic translation from the
Islamic calendar to Gregorian is impossible to perform reliably, as
it is based on human observation of the movements of the sun and
moon, not on the actual -- predictable -- movements of the sun and
the moon. Thus the exact numbering of dates is not usually known very
far in advance.)
--
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discuss@microformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
