[whatwg] <time>

Andy Mabbett andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk
Tue Mar 10 12:48:48 PDT 2009


In message <p06240812c5dc4a91b6f7@[17.202.35.52]>, David Singer 
<singer at apple.com> writes

>At 3:22  +0100 10/03/09, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>>That format has some serious limitations for heavy metadata users. In 
>>particular for those who are producing information about historical 
>>objects, from British Parliamentary records to histories of 
>>pre-communist Russia or China to museum collections, the fact that it 
>>doesn't handle Julian dates is a big problem - albeit one that could 
>>be solved relatively simply in a couple of different ways.
>
>The trouble is, that opens a large can of worms.

It may do. Does that mean we ignore the issue? Hope that somebody else 
will solve it?

More than one possible method of dealing with Julian dates has been 
proposed, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in being open to further 
ideas.

>Once we step out of the Gregorian calendar, we'll get questions about 
>various other calendar systems (e.g. Roman ab urbe condita 
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita>, Byzantine Indiction 
>cycles <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiction>, and any number of 
>other calendar systems from history and in current use).  Then, of 
>course, are the systems with a different 'year' (e.g. lunar rather than 
>solar). And if we were to introduce a 'calendar system designator', 
>we'd have to talk about how one converted/normalized.

How widely - compared to Julian dates - are those published, in the 
wild?

You might be tending towards 'Reductio ad absurdum'.

-- 
Andy Mabbett



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