Hi Andy
On 12 Mar 2009, at 21:46, Andy Mabbett wrote:
In message <[email protected]>,
Geoffrey Sneddon <[email protected]> writes
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?
What were the use-case(s) for ISO8601? If merely the exchange of
calendar information, it's unlikely that it took account of the pre-
Gregorian/ BCE/ imprecise situations under consideration here.
ISO8601 is already used by historians to mark up dates pre 1582 or
BCE, or even uncertain dates. The proleptic Gregorian calendar is
fine back to something like -10000BC, which covers pretty much all of
recorded history. Uncertain dates of the form we deal with on a day-
to-day basis in museums, like 'circa 1920' or 'late 20th century' can
be encoded as '1915/1925' or '1951/2000' using ISO8601.
I think uncertain times encoded as ISO8601 date ranges in the
datetime attribute will handle any reasonable markup of a historical
date. Anyone who has a weird use case that falls outside this can
fall back on RDFa.
Does anyone see a case for identifying the calendar of the date in
the running text, or is that just me wearing my pedantic, semantic
history markup hat?
Jim
Jim O'Donnell
[email protected]
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens
http://twitter.com/pekingspring
