[uf-dev] (Citation Format) ISO Dates

[brian suda]

I have run across two problems with Citation dates that i am hoping
someone can shed some light on:

1) Some publications are released quarterly such as Fall 2005, Spring
2006. The problem is that things needs to be machine readable, so using
the already established ABBR encoding scheme this would be represented
by something like:

<abbr class="dt" title="200510">Fall 2005</abbr>

The tricky thing is WHEN does FALL actually start, it is different
between the different hemispheres, Fall in the US, is not Fall in Brazil.

So when a publication date is simply FALL 2005, is there away this is
handled during encoding?

2) Date References for works in the BCE. How do you reference the Great
Pyramids? 4000BC.

<abbr title="-4000" class="dt">4000 BC</abbr>

But the 32bit problem works in reverse, 2038 will be the top-out for the
32 bit UNIX Time-stamp, so -2038 will also be a problem. (actually, alot
less depending on if the most-significant bit is 1 to determine it is a
negivite number... then we could only reference works in -1*(31^2)

So how do we, or can we, use ISO to reference dates of ancient works.
Wikipedia has an interesting article[1] about the ISO date format, but
doesn't answer all my questions.

-brian

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601