- From: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:37:08 -0400
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Andy Mabbett <andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote: > How widely - compared to Julian dates - are those published, in the wild? > > You might be tending towards 'Reductio ad absurdum'. There are definitely many non-Julian/Gregorian calendar systems used in the wild. Rarely in English, but often in other languages. The Jewish calendar is commonly used in Israel, for instance. (The front page of he.wikipedia.org has both "today in history", using the Julian/Gregorian calendar; and "events in the Hebrew calendar", the same thing using the Jewish calendar.) As far as I'm aware, the Muslim calendar is commonly used among the world's billion-plus Muslims, and the Chinese calendar by the billion-plus Chinese. And once you start with that, it pretty much goes without saying that for the sake of internationalism you have to spec every calendar that any group of 10,000 people anywhere in the world uses as long as someone is willing to write it up and post to www-style enough. Maybe not the Roman calendar AUC (let alone consul-based year names!), but there have got to be dozens that people could come up with that are in common use somewhere. This would almost certainly be a significant burden to implement in the long run. A much saner solution seems to be to say that HTML supports exactly one type of calendar: in this case, proleptic Gregorian. Authoring tools can be used to convert from other formats to Gregorian. This is the approach already taken by every computing standard I can think of. One fixed format is used for transmission (usually either proleptic Gregorian or Unix time). HTTP is one example of a widely-used format that does this already.
Received on Tuesday, 10 March 2009 14:37:08 UTC