RE: AW: ISO 8601 anyone?? And more on Parties.

[John McClure <hypergrove@olympus.net>]

Aron Roberts wrote:

> dated 2001-04-19, John McClure wrote:
>
> >Again, I think that both encodings -- a presentation encoding and an 8601
> >encoding -- are necessary. What's the problem with
> >
> ><instant value='2001-01-01'>New Year's Day</instant>
> ><instant value='2001-10-03T14:00'>03 Oct 01 2PM</instant>
> ><instant value='2001-10-03'>Oct. 3, 2001</instant>
>
>    A better way would be to uniformly store and transmit dates and
> time values using ISO 8601 representations, then to programmatically
> transform these values as needed to meet one's specific presentation
> requirements.

The requirement is to accommodate datastreams containing CSS directives. Not
a great idea to require XSL on every client machine.

>
>    This "as needed" transformation of data into presentation formats
> would reduce much of the overhead that would be required when
> transmitting and storing multiple formats, one intended for data, the
> other(s) for presentation.
>
>    Doing so would also reduce the possibility of inconsistencies
> between data and presentation formats (where someone might
> erroneously identify a particular date as a holiday, for instance),
> and of variations, minor or otherwise, between multiple instances of
> the same presentation format ("New Year", "New Years' Day", "New
> Year's Day", and so on ...")

This is like saying that every street in the world needs a concrete divider,
to keep people from crossing into oncoming traffic. Let's give development
staff a little more credit.

>
>    As a possible suggestion for how these transformations might most
> effectively be carried out, one could readily envision 'date and time
> format conversion' Web services (accessible via XML Protocol/SOAP),
> either run in-house within one's unit or organization or available as
> free or commercial services elsewhere on the Internet.
>
>    As an example, one might send '2001-01-01' as a string to a Web
> service that maintains a calendar of common names of holidays in the
> USA (for instance), which would in this case return a string such as
> "New Year's Day", suitable for presentation.

Sure. But not from the client machine.