On Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:03:37 +0100, David Singer <[email protected]> wrote:
At 3:22 +0100 10/03/09, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
That format has some serious limitations for heavy metadata users. In
particular for those who are producing information about historical
objects, from British Parliamentary records to histories of
pre-communist Russia or China to museum collections, the fact that it
doesn't handle Julian dates is a big problem - albeit one that could be
solved relatively simply in a couple of different ways.
The trouble is, that opens a large can of worms. Once we step out of
the Gregorian calendar, we'll get questions about various other calendar
systems (e.g. Roman ab urbe condita
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita>, Byzantine Indiction
cycles <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiction>, and any number of other
calendar systems from history and in current use). Then, of course, are
the systems with a different 'year' (e.g. lunar rather than solar). And
if we were to introduce a 'calendar system designator', we'd have to
talk about how one converted/normalized.
I'd rather have the historical pages say "In the 4th year of the first
Indiction cycle of the second reign of the Emperor Justinian called the
golden-nosed, in the 3rd day following the nones of August, at the hour
of dawn in the city of Chrysopolis" (and then they give the Gregorian
translation, e.g. 6am on the 12th of August 707 CE).
Indeed. That's one of the ways it can be done. IMHO it meets a huge set of
the possible use cases. And it has the sort of simplicity that tends to be
the defining characteristic of the best of HTML5. (Well, parsing isn't
simple and is clearly part of the best of, but I am sure you get my
drift...)
The other issue is the one of precision - while you can name a single
year, which will deal with a lot of use cases there are a lot left out
because the precision required is a period. Ranges are included in
8601, and making a range syntax that handled almost all the relevant
use cases is pretty straightforward.
Adding a range construct to 8601, or having a range construct ourselves
using 2 8601 dates, seems like something we could ask for or do.
Yep. Using a slash, as ISO 8601 does, strikes me as pretty simple and
gives us compatibility.
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
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