[whatwg] [wf2] Leap seconds, dates in the past

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 05:33:26 +0200, mozer <xmlizer at gmail.com> wrote:

> A lot of work as already been done by the W3C XSL WG on calendar (and  
> even negative year in needed)
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#lang-cal-country

> On 8/15/06, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Michel Fortin wrote:

>>>> I'm inclined to think that the best option for WF 2.0 is to require
>>>> the use of the proleptic Gregorian calendar all the way to 0001-01-01.
>>>
>>> What about prior dates?
>>
>> I don't think we need to support years before 1CE.
...
>> Anybody doing real work with dates that far back is going to have very
>> specific needs when it comes to calendars and WF2 isn't going to cut it
>> for them.

I disagree. There are a lot of use cases for simple forms dealing with  
dates before 0001-01-01 even if we just use the proleptic Gregorian  
calendar. The most obvious is a conversion widget between calendars -  
there is no need for machine-interpretable information to know that one  
date is julian and one gregorian to find the right dates for tracking key  
events leading to the October Revolution...

I think it is a reasonable decision to simply use proleptic Gregorian as  
the default date type, although I would like to see WF3 have some  
mechanism to declare a variation from that, because there are use cases  
where that is necessary for things that will happen in the next few  
months...

If the goal of WF2 is to provide something simple for people to use, then  
it ought to be a preferable option for people like history teachers with  
basic web skills, or the support guy or smart kid at school who helps them  
out.

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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