[uf-discuss] Human and machine readable data format

[David O]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Breton Slivka <zen at zenpsycho.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri at danbri.org> wrote:
>> Breton Slivka wrote:
>>
>>> I offer the challenge to those developers: If you sincerely believe
>>> that simple internationalized date parsing is an unsolvable or
>>> difficult problem (which, as I have pointed out has been solved
>>> numerous times already, with two examples), please present your
>>> evidence. Why is avoiding this work more important than Accessibility?
>>> Why is avoiding this work more important than avoiding hidden
>>> metadata?

> This is a simple example. There are likely better techniques for doing
> this than regexes, (or not) but the point is, that you can make a
> human READABLE format without having to cover the whole spectrum of
> human expression. Instead, you have ONE precise format for US dates,
> ONE precise format for UK dates, ONE precise format for japanese
> dates, etc, etc.  You stick this format of date in the title of an
> ABBR, and you can say whatever you want about the date in whatever
> language you like in the contents of the ABBR. The parser shouldn't
> care about the contents. IT's just looking at the title. IT already
> is. The only change from the current pattern is that we'd be using a
> less geeky and obscure format than ISO-8601. The lang attribute of the
> ABBR element provides the format in use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

Feel free to get started.  I'm sure you can start a wiki page with a
listing of language/region codes and the suggested date format for
each.  Since the current system handles every one of those languages
and countries/regions, it would only be logical to expect the same of
a suggested replacement.