[uf-discuss] Human and machine readable data format

[Breton Slivka]

> Do you have any examples of the non-Gregorian dates being published online?
>  Or any examples of applications that can take non-Gregorian dates as input?
>
> I think we've established non-Gregorian calendars exist, but most countries
> officially adopted the Gregorian calendar several decades before the web
> existed (e.g. Japan in 1873).  Such adoption wasn't exclusive, but it draws
> into question (for me anyway) whether such calendars are common enough on
> the web and have enough potential use cases to warrant modeling in
> microformats.  I realize it's difficult to do such research without
> belonging to the cultures in which it would appear.  Unfortunately that just
> makes it more necessary to avoid mistakes.
>
> Peace,
> Scott
>




Just to clarify, the original point I was trying to make wasn't that
we should model every possible language/calendar in the world. Just
that it was unreasonable to expect that from a potential replacement
for ISO 8601, since ISO 8601 itself does not meet that requirement.
This was in response to "David O" who wrote:


>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.

I hope I have convinced a few people that David O's logic falls down
at the premise. But this is not to argue that we should make a
replacement format that handles that usecase, but rather to consider
replacements that don't, since such a replacement would be no worse
than the current format, but *would* provide benefits that ISO8601
does not.