[whatwg] Dates and coordinates in HTML5

[David Singer]

At 13:59  -0500 24/02/09, WeBMartians wrote:
>It's back! It won't die! :-)
>
>Although it can be argued that a standard should not consider the 
>work required for implementation, many of the trade-offs in 
>reference to times and dates do indeed take the present state of 
>code into consideration.
>
>One reason for not supporting BCE is a disagreement between 
>historians and, say, astronomers, on how to represent the year 
>immediately preceding year one. Is it year -1 (1 BCE) or year zero?
>
>Currently, the text states that all dates and times since the 
>beginning of the common era (0001-01-01 00:00:00Z) must be 
>supported. Yes, the Javascript values can specify dates and times 
>before this epoch. However, there is no way to interrogate the 
>environment as to whether or not such values can be used with 
><time>. That would require much more work. Thus, the limitation of 
>common era.
>
>I'd love to see support for BCE and even for prolepsis and 
>non-Gregorian calendars. ...but I do see the "no BCE" compromise as 
>a workable one.


ISO 8601 is quite precise on this issue.  Since these are both 
machine and human-readable, why is this precision a problem?

Why would we not use ISO 6709 (Annex H, text string) as the format 
for location?

-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.