On 10 Mar 2009, at 17:03, David Singer 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.
Ultimately, why is the Gregorian calendar good enough for the ISO but
not us? I'm sure plenty of arguments were made to the ISO before
ISO8601 was published, yet that still supports only the Gregorian
calendar, having been revised twice since it's original publication in
1988. Is there really any need to go beyond what ISO 8601 supports?
--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>
