RE: [xml-dev] W3C Schema: Resistance is Futile, says Don Box

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 8:43 AM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] W3C Schema: Resistance is Futile, says Don Box
> 
> >Why would somebody who can't deal with date formats want to do that 
> >sort of work?
> 
> It's not a matter of "can't deal with date formats".  It's a 
> matter of 
> respecting the original information and being capable of 
> dealing with it as 
> presented.  Not everyone is thrilled with normalization to ISO 8601 
> Gregorian calendars.
> 
> (For a delightfully complex case, ask any pre-20th century 
> historian about 
> Julian dates and computers and comparisons between dates in different 
> countries and what that does to things like representations 
> of original 
> documents.)

Agreed. I was going to bring this up but saw you beat me to the punch.
The problem with date formats is that  for normal every day usage there
is simply no unified standard across the world. Considering that XML is
supposed to be an international standard (Unicode and all) this is
something worth noting instead of assuming everyone uses your date
format of choice and it should be enforced on everyone else. 
 


> >  If the schema
> >language or an individual schema required some cryptic, proprietary 
> >format I would agree. But any educated person can *understand* 
> >'2002-06-11' without too much effort.
> 
> I dunno.  Is that June 11 or November 6?  A normalization 
> that makes sense 
> to your kind of educated person may not make sense to mine.

Same question I was going to ask. 

Now I don't disagree with the fact that W3C XML Schema has date related
types since many consider this essential but do question the assumption
that there is one true, unambiguous, and universal date format that is
accessible by lay people for every day usage. 

-- 
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