Re: BC Dates

At 16:24 00/02/29 +0000, Martin Bryan wrote:
>There would appear to be no mechanism for entering a data prior to 0 AD.
>Could -CCYY be allowed, with the proviso that 0000 is not a valid year?

I believe that this form is allowed by the schema spec.  Section 3.3.24.1
says 

  To accommodate year values outside the range from 0 to 9999, additional 
  digits can be added to the left of this representation and an 
  preceding "-" is allowed.

I believe there are two typos here (there is no year 0 in the Gregorian
calendar, so the range should be 1-9999, and for 'an' read 'a'), but
the phrase about the preceding minus sign is not a typo.

Personally, I agree that there should be a note pointing out that '0000' 
is not a valid year; otherwise, too many implementors will get it wrong.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Tuesday, 9 May 2000 10:53:38 UTC