From: Paul & Eleanor (goodhill_at_xmission.com)
Date: Sat Feb 10 2001 - 21:20:26 CET
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martinl_at_talk21.com wrote:
> Explicit <day><month><year> elements also remove's Mike's problem
> as to what to do with dates which can't be made as precise as the
> standard requires (not unlikely for historic data, albeit undesirable).
Interesting problem, I hadn't considering the odd historical date
missing
some field.
But on re-reading ISO 8601
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
I see
]If only the month or even only the year is of interest:
> 1995-02 or 1995
So actually it is covered. I hadn't realized this.
By the way, on worrying about the non-conforming American who would drop
back
to his own format. Month followed by day is the American format (but
with slashes, and with the year after). It is the non-conforming
European
you have to worry about, who would stick to his old day/month converting
it to day-month (but again with year afterwards instead of 8601 which
is YYYY-MM-dd).
IMHO I really think Markus (the guy who wrote that site, but also has
serious
interest in ISO8601) and his friends (and enemies!) have done a great
job
of beating out the issues of dates, I really don't think we need to
re-invent multiple tags just to deal with a date.
Anyway, You should be able to detect a non-conforming format quick
enough as soon as someone surveys on a day of the month past the
12th. :-)
Maybe the CaveXML date format would be ISO8601 _with_ all of the
punctuation (and not various curious features).
That should help any ambiguities.
By the way, if you are worried about reading ISO8601 dates I can write
just a few lines of code in Java to read fixed forms of it. YMMV.
-Paul
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