Re: ISO8601 and XML Schema dateTime

At 2001-05-08 14:13, Jeff Rafter wrote:

>Is this documented somewhere (other than the XML Schema spec)?  I think I
>may need some additional paper to convince colleagues...


Grotefend's Handbuch der Zeitrechnung may be inaccessible, but
if you check your nearest research library under chronology and
calendars, or in any handbook of classics (recall that classical
historians really do need to worry about this) you will surely find
the documentation you need.  Perhaps the XML Schema spec should
include some informative references in a future version; as it is,
we just worked on the basis that it was common knowledge.  An
encounter with Dershowitz and Reingold's otherwise superb book
'Calendrical Calculations' suggests it's not quite such common
knowledge; they do observe correctly that the Julian calendar has
no year 0, but decide that for their purposes the Gregorian
calendar should have one (it does make date arithmetic for
date ranges including both CE and BCE dates easier, but it does
not, I believe, match the usage of those who actually do use the
Gregorian calendar for dates in that period.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2001 08:58:25 UTC