[uf-discuss] Human and machine readable data format

[Breton Slivka]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Breton Slivka <zen at zenpsycho.com> wrote:
>> 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
>>
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> 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.
>

And just for the record, I would happily construct such a wikipage,
but I am overcommitted as it is! Perhaps in time, once some things are
calmed down.