RE: midnight in ISO 8601 (was: Re: Notes on the say-as note)

Hi,

I'm writing this mailing list as potential content writer. My job is to make
web applications accessible. The user of our software find working with
voice browsers often hard.
We would much rather simple add voiceXML tags, which are not shown in a
common browser, but allow controlling the application by speech. This means
texts in this file that can be read by both humans as TTS systems.

Each language has it own format in numbers, dates, time, etc. Taking in
concern that the text is also displayed on screen, voiceXML should not force
a certain format. Instead the TTS system should use the current language to
decide how to pronounce the number, date or time correctly.

I do not know if my prospect of voiceXML is in line with the goal of the
standard, though I hope you will take this note in consideration.

Best regards,

Arnold Daniels 


-----Original Message-----
From: www-voice-request@w3.org [mailto:www-voice-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Sent: woensdag 1 juni 2005 22:44
To: www-voice@w3.org
Subject: midnight in ISO 8601 (was: Re: Notes on the say-as note)

In http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-voice/2005AprJun/0035.html,
Dave Pawson wrote:

  00-23 for hours.
  I'd rather stay with iso8601.

Similarly, various other posters to the thread have 
seemed to accept as a premise that ISO 8601 does not
allow "24" in an hours element.

In the interests of having a clear record, perhaps 
it should be pointed out that if one would rather 
"stay with" ISO 8601, then the value 24 really 
does need to be allowed to appear in the hours field 
of time expressions.  The copies of ISO 8601 I have 
on my shelf (the IS of 1988 and a "final draft" 
from 2000) both specifically mention that midnight 
may be denoted either as "00:00:00" or as "24:00:00" 
(clause 5.3.2 in each case).  

I suspect Mr. Pawson was misled by the restriction 
to the range 00-23 in the profile at
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime -- this is a 
change vis-a-vis ISO 8601, not a reflection of a
restriction made by ISO 8601.

In the context of the SSML 1.0 say-as element, it 
seems clear to me that Eira Monstad is right to suggest
that a restriction to the range 0-23 is unhelpful
in the task of describing time expressions in 
unconstrained natural-language text, and that the
range 0-24 would be more useful.


-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
 World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Thursday, 2 June 2005 09:55:34 UTC