RE: Core Component Analysis - SWIFT's Comments

["Arnold, Curt" <Curt.Arnold@hyprotech.com>]

Sandy Klausner wrote:
>Doesn't the adoption of ISO 8601 take care of the time zone problem with 
>Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)?
>Sandy

Joaquin Miller wrote:
>This is just an example, of course, but the time is underspecified.  
>Perhaps the reason for the ellipsis is that one more thing is needed to 
>describe a BirthDate: time zone or location.  

I strongly opposed allowing the time zone qualifier to allowed on the XML schema timeInstant representation since it allowed you to "hint" at the physical location of an event in the lexical
representation (by providing a time zone) in a datatype that is supposed to be strictly temporial.  I suggested that the only options would be unsuffixed (meaning local to some context defined by
usage which could not be compared or ordered) and Z (UTC and ordered) suffixed.  

Using a consistent Z suffix, greatly simplifies sorting which now can be as a straight string comparision.  I think the unprefixed form, would have little value to ebXML since it is ambiguous.

If you want to represent the time zone that the death occurred in, then that should be represented as a distinct attribute.