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Hi Andy<div><br><div><div>On 12 Mar 2009, at 21:46, Andy Mabbett wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In message <<a href="mailto:CAAF25CF-1FBE-494C-8361-E6811B6C5EC3@googlemail.com">CAAF25CF-1FBE-494C-8361-E6811B6C5EC3@googlemail.com</a>>, Geoffrey Sneddon <<a href="mailto:foolistbar@googlemail.com">foolistbar@googlemail.com</a>> writes</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> <blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Ultimately, why is the Gregorian calendar good enough for the ISO but not us? I'm sure plenty of arguments were made to the ISO before ISO8601 was published, yet that still supports only the Gregorian calendar, having been revised twice since it's original publication in 1988. Is there really any need to go beyond what ISO 8601 supports?</div> </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">What were the use-case(s) for ISO8601? If merely the exchange of calendar information, it's unlikely that it took account of the pre-Gregorian/ BCE/ imprecise situations under consideration here.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div></blockquote>ISO8601 is already used by historians to mark up dates pre 1582 or BCE, or even uncertain dates. The proleptic Gregorian calendar is fine back to something like -10000BC, which covers pretty much all of recorded history. Uncertain dates of the form we deal with on a day-to-day basis in museums, like 'circa 1920' or 'late 20th century' can be encoded as '1915/1925' or '1951/2000' using ISO8601.</div><div><br></div><div>I think uncertain times encoded as ISO8601 date ranges in the datetime attribute will handle any reasonable markup of a historical date. Anyone who has a weird use case that falls outside this can fall back on RDFa.</div><div><br></div><div>Does anyone see a case for identifying the calendar of the date in the running text, or is that just me wearing my pedantic, semantic history markup hat?</div><div><br></div><div>Jim</div><div><br></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div>Jim O'Donnell</div><div><a href="mailto:jim@eatyourgreens.org.uk">jim@eatyourgreens.org.uk</a></div><div><a href="http://eatyourgreens.org.uk">http://eatyourgreens.org.uk</a></div><div><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens">http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens</a></div><div><a href="http://twitter.com/pekingspring">http://twitter.com/pekingspring</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></div></body></html>