RE: Notes on the say-as note

 

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Eira Monstad 
    
    The intention of the working group who wrote the say-as 
    note, according to  
    the paragraph from the note I quoted in my message.
    
 
    > I always thought ISO was international?
    
    It is international in its way, but its intended use is 
    different. ISO  
    8601 is meant to be used for reliable data interchange, not 
    to handle  
    common usecases in texts intended for humans. The working 
    group has  
    apparently acknowledged this problem, since they have 
    stated clearly in  
    the say-as note that the time format is *not* intended to 
    be iso 8601  
    compliant. 
And hence different from all other XML based date times?




All I ask for is that the hour 24 is allowed, so 
    that more  
    Norwegian/Danish texts are covered, just like they allow 
    non-iso 8601  
    am/pm time formats to cover more English texts.

And when another nation asks for their favourite exception?



    
    If the say-as time format were to be iso 8601 compliant, it 
    would be  
    unsuitable for a very large number of human-readable texts, 
But could be reliably converted to whatever format, by a machine.



    thereby  
    defying the purpose of the say-as element. The idea is to make the  
    contained text easy to understand for a machine even though 
    it was written  
    for a human.

With the Norwegian use case, or some other use case?



    
    I agree that following iso 8601 is a very good idea if you 
    are in control  
    of the time string, but this is about recognizing time 
    strings that were  
    never intended to be machine readable in the first place.
How can you say that, when referring to authored content?



    Well, the whole idea is that by marking up the text, you 
    won't have to  
    guess what it means...


Only if the markup is reliable. What format would you expect an
author in Taiwan to use? The Norwegian form? An East coast states
format etc etc. Reliable markup uses standards, not edge cases.




regards DaveP.
  

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Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2005 08:54:36 UTC