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Jonathan Borden wrote:
> Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> > I think Joe made a killer point with his mention that you probably don't
> write
> > <quantity><hundreds>1</hundreds><tens>4</tens><ones>4</ones></quantity>
>
> I missed the point of this one.
The point was that numbers, when encoded in an XML document,
are almost always represented as atomic strings, with no further
markup required to distinguish the different components of the
lexical representation, number system used, etc.
The implication was that it's acceptable and even useful
to encode dates and names as atomic strings as well (depending
on the needs of the data).
> All numbers I've seen writted (unlike dates)
> are written right to left in increasing significance.
And every date in ISO-8601 format is written with the
year first, followed by the month, then the day.
That's why the vocabulary definition should specify
"a date in ISO 8601 format" or "a date, written YYYY-MM-DD"
and not simply "a date"; the latter is too underspecified
to be reliable.
(Strictly speaking, vocabulary definitions should probably also
specify "an integer, written in base-10 (decimal) notation"
and not just "a number", since the latter doesn't rule out
"MCMXCIX", "twelve", or "0x1F"; but the former is usually
tacitly assumed.)
--Joe English
jenglish@flightlab.com
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