Re: Calendaring I18N

Hello Robin,

2010/3/23 Robin Berjon <robin@robineko.com>

> Dear I18N WG,
>
> as part of its work, the DAP WG is creating a Calendar API that is intended
> to be used by Web applications in order to interact with calendar data. The
> current editors' draft can be found at
> http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/calendar/.
>
> Our first instinct was to turn to iCalendar (RFC 5545) and other related
> specifications in order to rely on tried and true practice in the field.
> However, in the process of applying that information to our work it surfaced
> that no existing standard that we have come across to date seems to capture
> information relating to non-Gregorian calendars.
>
> As you know likely better than we do, non-Gregorian calendars are in common
> use throughout much of the world, and as far as we know it is always
> possible to convert between them and Gregorian dates — which makes the
> latter fine for internal storage. However, capturing the calendaring system
> intended by the user when entering the date is important as it may convey
> important semantics and will have impacts on recurrence if for instance the
> specified non-Gregorian date does not map to the same Gregorian day each
> year.
>
> Our current plan is to store dates as Gregorian, and use an additional
> field to capture the user-intended calendar. The points on which we would
> like to solicit your help are:
>
>  1) Is this a good and sane approach that will work?
>  2) Is there a list of calendars that we could use to provide a definitive
> list of calendar names that implementations would be expected to recognise?


You might get some additional data about this point from CLDR
http://cldr.unicode.org/
which is defined using LDML
http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/#Calendar_Elements

If you download http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/1.8.0/core.zip , the
common/main directory contains the data for many locals, using several
calendar names for each locale. The bcp47 directory contains a calendar.xml
file, which has a very short list of calendar names. I am not an expert in
CLDR -  "Mark Davis" <mark@macchiato.com> can tell you whether this is the
right data.

Best,

Felix


> Wikipedia has a list [0] (from which presumably we'd only take the "In
> current use" ones) but we'd like to have some degree of certainty that it's
> complete and correct.
>
> Further, I would like to note that were it not for our Korean participants,
> the group would not have been aware of the problem regardless of how much we
> care about I18N. It seems to me that the information we need to get this
> right for our specification may benefit from being documented and shared
> with a wider readership.
>
> We look forward to your input on this issue, and thank you in advance for
> any help!
>
> [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars
>
> PS: Tracker, this takes care of ACTION-128.
>
> --
> Robin Berjon
>  robineko — hired gun, higher standards
>  http://robineko.com/
>
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