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amyzing@talsever.com (Amelia A Lewis) writes:
> It's extremely interesting to me that the date types seem to have such
> prominence in this discussion.
>
> XSDL has *nine* datatypes related to time information (date, time, dateTime,
> duration, and 5 x gHorribleKludge), all of which are primitive types with
> similar (sometimes nearly identical, especially in the gHorribleKludge set)
> lexical representations, and no common ancestor but anySimpleType.
>
> Does this correspond to a programming language that you currently use? If
Not having read any of the relevant specs perhaps I shouldn't say
anything but the above statement makes me disappointed in the
direction people seem to be taking this work.
I would like to think that any work being done on strong typing in
XML is directed towards allowing systems to indicate their context
and thus avoid having to send too much data.
Then, if two systems want to work within a different strongly typed
context, what should there be to stop them? Consider:
<xml type-context="some-common-standard">
<date>7/5/2002</date>
and
<xml type-context="my-cool-types">
<date>Jurassic +500</date>
Both ``dates'' are perfectly valid *within their own contexts* and
neither has any reason to claim superiority over the other. They can
operate quite independently of one another and there's no reason why
they can't interoperate (given some context).
> And with all that expensive complexity, you still can't easily represent a
> datatype indicating a non-Gregorian time instant, increment, or duration
> without custom definition and agreement at the application level.
From which follows, what does 7/5/2002 mean to you? Either we share
some (date) context that it means 7th of May or it means July 5th.
It doesn't matter how you represent it so long as we both know how to
interpret it.
Is there any means of indicating non-W3C types?
Cheers,
Ian
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