In message <p06240812c5dc4a91b...@[17.202.35.52]>, David Singer
<sin...@apple.com> writes
At 3:22 +0100 10/03/09, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
That format has some serious limitations for heavy metadata users. In
particular for those who are producing information about historical
objects, from British Parliamentary records to histories of
pre-communist Russia or China to museum collections, the fact that it
doesn't handle Julian dates is a big problem - albeit one that could
be solved relatively simply in a couple of different ways.
The trouble is, that opens a large can of worms.
It may do. Does that mean we ignore the issue? Hope that somebody else
will solve it?
More than one possible method of dealing with Julian dates has been
proposed, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in being open to further
ideas.
Once we step out of the Gregorian calendar, we'll get questions about
various other calendar systems (e.g. Roman ab urbe condita
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita>, Byzantine Indiction
cycles <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiction>, and any number of
other calendar systems from history and in current use). Then, of
course, are the systems with a different 'year' (e.g. lunar rather than
solar). And if we were to introduce a 'calendar system designator',
we'd have to talk about how one converted/normalized.
How widely - compared to Julian dates - are those published, in the
wild?
You might be tending towards 'Reductio ad absurdum'.
--
Andy Mabbett
