- From: Martin Bryan <mtbryan@sgml.u-net.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 08:40:12 +0100
- To: "John McConnell" <johnmcco@microsoft.com>, "'David Perrell'" <davidp@earthlink.net>, <www-international@w3.org>
John/David >I concur with David especially when you expand the scope of dates to >include that used by applications (not just the system date). I've >worked on software that had to operate on dates in the middle of the >next millenium (related to nuclear facility management) and way beyond >(astronomy software for predicting eclipses and unusual alignments). >It's a royal pain when the system software doesn't handle this. ISO 8601 is postulated only on the use of the Christian dating system - therefore does not need to support anything more than 4 digits. If you want a more comprehensive dating system then you have to use something more complex, like the HyTime specfication. I do not know of any websites that give overviews of the HyTime calendar features, but can point you to the source data: For details of the calendar related lexical types defined in HyTime see: ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/wg8/document/n1920/html/clause-C.1.1.html Note particularly that this mechanism is extensible - ERA could have more entries and fulldate could be updated to have as many numbers as required. For details of how these lexical types are applied in HyTime see: ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/wg8/document/n1920/html/clause-9.9.html
Received on Friday, 24 October 1997 03:42:23 UTC