At 13:59 -0500 24/02/09, WeBMartians wrote:
It's back! It won't die! :-)
Although it can be argued that a standard should not consider the
work required for implementation, many of the trade-offs in
reference to times and dates do indeed take the present state of
code into consideration.
One reason for not supporting BCE is a disagreement between
historians and, say, astronomers, on how to represent the year
immediately preceding year one. Is it year -1 (1 BCE) or year zero?
Currently, the text states that all dates and times since the
beginning of the common era (0001-01-01 00:00:00Z) must be
supported. Yes, the Javascript values can specify dates and times
before this epoch. However, there is no way to interrogate the
environment as to whether or not such values can be used with
<time>. That would require much more work. Thus, the limitation of
common era.
I'd love to see support for BCE and even for prolepsis and
non-Gregorian calendars. ...but I do see the "no BCE" compromise as
a workable one.
ISO 8601 is quite precise on this issue. Since these are both
machine and human-readable, why is this precision a problem?
Why would we not use ISO 6709 (Annex H, text string) as the format
for location?
--
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.
