RE: Where are we?

At 10:29 11.10.99 -0700, Dan Zigmond wrote:
>One of my colleagues, Dean Blackketter, has been working on a system for
>describing time periods using the URI fragment syntax.  This seems like a
>fairly natural extension of the notion of fragment into the time domain,
>since in a sense what you're asking for is a way to specify that fragment of
>a television stream that contains the material broadcasted at a particular
>time.
>
>I'll let Dean post a more complete specification, but the basic syntax uses
>ISO-8601 time formats and looks something like this:
>
>         tv:pbs.org#1999-10-11T13-00-00/1999-10-11T13-30-00
>
>which represents whatever is on PBS between 1PM and 1:30 today.  I've made
>this unnecessarily long just as an example; in 8601 you can drop the
>trailing zeros, and the date itself is optional.  I think 8601 is a pretty
>complete and flexible representation of time, so leveraging it makes the
>problem a lot simpler than having to make something up.
>
>As has been pointed out, this is a fundamentally different problem than URIs
>for specific programs on television, which should be independent of both
>network and time.
Seems logical.
two things to note:

- dropping the date is unwise in the extreme unless you want the syntax to
   mean "every day" - which is an extension I would very much like to avoid.
   see below.

- On the principle of "all URLs escape the context for which they were
   created", I would VERY much like to ask for the mandatory inclusion of
   timezone. You never know who is going to try to watch this, via what medium.

So your example (also including a feed identifier) would become

tv:east.pbs.org#1999-10-11T13-00-00+0500/1999-10-11T13-30-00+0500

and be unambiguous whether it was looked up in Texas or California.

                       Harald


--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@maxware.no

Received on Tuesday, 12 October 1999 04:36:37 UTC