Re: ISO 8601 anyone?? - ISO 8601 Attached

[Martin Bryan <mtbryan@sgml.u-net.com>]

Brian Hayes wrote

> Ian, thanks for your thoughtful reply.  My original message was to help
> generate alternative ideas to ISO 8601, since at Commerce One we
occasonally
> run into problems with it.  The particular problem that comes to mind are
> date-time values that have implied values.  For example, we might write on
a
> paper document "April 2001" with some implied notion of end-of-month or
> begining-of-month. Or, what is the standard for encoding a date-time for a
> contract ending on April 30, 2001?
>
> Yes, optional values are an issue.  That's why something else is needed.
In
> EDI there are MIGs and some of us in the industry are seeing a need for a
> MIG like thing when using XML... Hmm a schema for a schema.

W3C Schema allows optional parts of dates to be replaced by a hyphen, and
allows dates to be truncated where parts are not relevant. So --0501 means
any 1st May, while 2001-05 means any date in May 2001. For things like
contract end you can either state separate start and end dates or a start
date and a period. It should be noted, however, that CC Representation Types
do not support periods.

Martin Bryan