Re: Date

At 14:14 01/07/05 -0700, Jeff Rafter wrote:
>[snip]
>
> > I would have preferred to allow no timezone at all than one that
> > has such minimal effect on  semantics and comparison.
>
>Wow, glad to hear I am not alone in my dislike of the additional Time Zone
>Qualifiers-- especially with changing the semantics of the ISO.

In what respect do the XML Schema time zones change the semantics
of ISO (I guess you mean ISO 8601)?


>Ultimately introducing this modified date time type will be difficult-- I am
>wondering if there is a way to modify the lexical space without affecting
>the value space. If there was a way, then we may be able to have future
>types that use Month and Day names as well-- localized to specific languages
>even.

There were proposals for going into such a direction. This would make it
easy to use XML Schema for all kinds of data formats. But it would break
one of the main purposes of XML Schema, namely that you can exchange
data (with anybody anywhere) and know what it means. The ISO-based
date/time format looks clumsy, but all applications will understand
it. How could we guarantee that all XML Schema processors understand
all the different date formats in all the different calendars and
languages around the world?
The only reasonable way seemed to be to put conversion code into
XML Schema, but that would have killed its declarative nature.


Regards,   Martin.

Received on Saturday, 7 July 2001 02:14:52 UTC