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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: RFE: Date Format
--7JfCtLOvnd9MIVvH Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable on Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 11:24:04PM +1030, David Lloyd (lloy0076@rebel.net.a= u) wrote: > > So I suggest the valid value for the year be any non-zero interger > > (negative values to be treated as B.C.E. dates). >=20 > An alternative is that there is a setting: >=20 > <era> > </era> >=20 > Which could take a default value of AD. This has a big advantage because > it takes into account: >=20 > * Buddhist's take a different year as "Year 1" > * Islamic people take a different year as "Year 1" >=20 > And we avoid that cultural war... Wouldn't that be a role of date? There are several problems with calendars in general (sorry, prior life as a data analyst dealing with time and dates). - Calendars are an artificial construct. There are the odd inconsistancies which vary by time and place, as well as calendar system adopted. While time and elapsed time are well defined, the choice of mileposts and start dates is in fact arbitrary. - There's no agreement on what specific date applies in the past -- Russia's "October Revolution" was due to a late adoption of the Gregorian calendar (most of the rest of the world places it in November). In different locales, adoption occured any time between 1752 and the mid 20th century, with England and the United States picking it up in 1792, IIRC. - There are other calendars: the Jewish, Chinese, Mayan, Roman, and Sumerian, among others. - If you really want to argue idiosyncracies, there are calendars which don't follow the Gregorian convention of twelve months, or seven-day weeks, let alone start-of-year date (December was the tenth month of the Roman calendar, starting in our March), or even, in cases, the convention of 365=B1 days. France, following the revolution, experimented with a ten-day week (the "d=E9cade"), from 1793 to 1805. Soviet Russia's Nepreryvka, was a five-day "uninterrupted production week", implemented from 1929 to 1931, then a six day week from 1931 to 1940, ending finally in June of 1940 then the seven-day week was reinstated. - DocBook probably doesn't need to be concerned with arithmetic accuracy in representing dates. Managing to localize dates to specific calendars is probably an excessive goal. Most calendars do share the common elements of week, month, and year. However, these elements may not follow the same sequence, making numbering schema inconsistant. A general discussion of calendars and their history is found in Eviatar Zerubavel's _The Seven Day Circle: the history and meaning of the week_, University of Chicago Press, (c) 1985, ISBN: 0-226-98165-7. The suggestion to have day, month, and year elements would require=20 date roles of both "era" and "calendar" in order to be fully generalized. Defaults could be "CE" and "Gregorian", and stylesheets could translate formats into appropriate display formats. =20 The other straighforward alternative is that dates in DocBook be assumed to be Gregorian, CE, with other variants simply expressed as literals in text. --=20 Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org --7JfCtLOvnd9MIVvH Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE6WPI+OEeIn1XyubARAi8RAJ93G0q2LhCrdRnWb8uhqZe4LddauQCfZmix U/uJstjJoeFMqI1C32NXuHM= =+Fv5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --7JfCtLOvnd9MIVvH--
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