Re: Date/time tag??
eostrom@fiicmds04.tu-graz.ac.at (Erik Ostrom)
From: eostrom@fiicmds04.tu-graz.ac.at (Erik Ostrom)
Message-id: <9308021822.AA09795@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 93 19:23:18 +0100
To: mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <3102.744314944@moose.cs.indiana.edu> (message from Marc VanHeyningen on Mon, 02 Aug 1993 13:09:04 -0500)
Subject: Re: Date/time tag??
Status: RO
- Dates frequently represent bounded intervals rather than a single
point in time. Should there be a way to represent "from 3:00 until
8:00 PDT on 30 Nov 95" in these?
- Dates vary in terms of their quantity of significant "terms"; e.g.
"November, 1993" should be representable and it's certainly not the
same as "1 Nov 1993 00:00:00 GMT".
So, suppose we allow for leaving out sections:
<date at="1993">1993</date>
<date at="Nov 1993">this month</date>
<date at="1 Nov 1993">the first of November, 1993</date>
<date at="1 Nov 1993 00:00:00">midnight</date>
Length of field is enough to distinguish between these.
I think we could consider this a special case of your first point:
<date at="1 May 1993">Mayday</date>
is in some sense the same as
<date at="1 May 1993 00:00:00" until="2 May 1993 00:00:00">Mayday</date>
On the other hand, this looks both ugly and ambiguous to me at first glance.
I like the "at" and "until" attributes as an answer to the question of
intervals--short names are nice. Would these cause problems?
- Marc
--Erik
P.S. While we're on the subject of things it would be nice to be able to
indicate, "the third Monday of each month" or "at 3:00 daily" are a kind of
date that comes up fairly often--repeating events. I don't know how
complicated we want to make this, though.