[whatwg] <time>

[Geoffrey Sneddon]

On 10 Mar 2009, at 17:03, David Singer wrote:

> 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.  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.

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?


--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>