Re: [xml-dev] Incompleteness of Duration

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Greg Hunt scripsit:

> To the extent that ISO is a culture all to itself (the ISO definition of a
> week does not align with traditional Christian, Islamic or Jewish calendars
> but does seem to be well suited for the Western working week), Mike's point
> about the start, definition and numbering of weeks seems to be reinforced
> by your comment.

Well, no doubt.  But the fact that YYYY-MM-DD is a relatively uncommon
way of writing dates (mostly found in East Asia) didn't stop ISO from
standardizing it or XML Schema datatypes from adopting it.  So "Ways of
conceptualizing the week are diverse" is not an argument against accepting
the ISO way, any more than "Ways of writing the date are diverse" is.

It's true that Zawinski's Snowclone says: "People say, 'There are N
ways to do things.  I know!  We'll create an international standard!'
Now there are N + 1 ways of doing things."  But examples like ASCII and
Unicode show that if you want a while, and the standard is really good
enough for its time, the other N ways of doing things become marginalized
and may even disappear: who uses Baudot or Flexowriter codes, or American
Morse, today?

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