[uf-new] ISO-31-1

[Glenn Jones]

Martin McEvoy wrote:

> There is  a study page on the microformats wiki for the exploration of

> ISO 31-1 [1] as a way of marking up durations and intervals. please
feel 
> free to add your comments and suggestions and markup examples.

> [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/ISO-31-1

You have to be carefully in exploring new options that you don't cause
issues elsewhere. I think changing duration is a case in point, as it is
not only used in hAudio, but also in hCalendar and in turn hResume.

Although we could use days as a measure of a duration for large time
periods it does not always work when trying to mark-up certain text i.e.
"3 Years and 4 month" is more meaningful to a human than "1068 days".


Having different datatypes for a property of the same name is very
problematic. Personally I would not like us to use ISO-8601 for
hCalendar duration and ISO-31-1 for duration in hAudio. Some parsers do
try to convert formats into datatypes this could become hellish if we
use the same property names for different data formats.

Last but not least you have also just walked into the internalisation
issue from the "Human and machine readable data format" debate. Not all
languages use the Arabic numerals ie 0,1,2, 3 etc  

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals

Although most people will understand Arabic numerals and you find them
mixed in with languages like Chinese, it's still an issue that need
thought.


Glenn Jones