[tei-council] what to do with dating attributes -- VOTE!

[Syd Bauman]

> That last one is tricky. 

Indeed it is.


> I'm not sure, Syd and Sebastian, why you have characterised the
> "attribute-level" solution (A) as NOT making the easy things easy,
> and "just too confusing for day to day use". Could you clarify
> where the confusion might lie please? It seems to me that we could
> have <date value="2007">this year</date> and that this is easy. So
> I must be missing something.

With the attribute-level solution every time any user (who hasn't
removed attributes in her customization) inserts a <date> element,
her XML-aware editor would present here with a slew of possible
attributes: 
   value=
   value.iso=
   value.usr=
   notBefore=
   notBefore.iso=
   notBefore.usr=
   notAfter=
   notAfter.iso=
   notAfter.usr=
   from=
   from.iso=
   from.usr=
   to=
   to.iso=
   to.usr=
   dur=
   dur.iso=
   dur.usr=
not to mention the non-date-specific attributes. No simple check-box
style customization could change this. (Although, as I'm fond of
pointing out, it isn't really that hard without the check-box
simplicity.) For the vast majority of users, 2/3 of the above
attributes would never be used, and would just be in the way.


> I think B and C are weaker (if I understand them correctly) in that
> they would prohibit mixing calendars in a document (at least, with
> the same element, so that date/@value would have to have a
> consistent type throughout a document). Is that a correct
> understanding? 

Off the top of my head I think that is correct if the user is using
the "simple format" date attributes, regardless of which option we
choose. That's because the simple W3C format is definitionally
Gregorian, and arguably proleptic Gregorian. Things are a little
better with ISO 8601, which is explicitly Gregorian or proleptic
Gregorian, and arguably the syntax could be used for others.

I'm of a mind that, regardless of system, we should define value= and
iso-value= as (proleptic) Gregorian. User-defined values could be of
whatever calendar the user desired. The *content* is in whatever
calendar is specified by calendar=.


> In some ways I prefer D because it implies that the attributes have
> particular semantics which are in a sense independent of the
> particular calendrical "syntax" used.

I'm sorry, I think I'm too tired (or too stupid :-) to understand
this. 


> Incidentally, ... use distinct XML namespaces for the different
> data types. ... e.g. ... <date iso-8601:value="--0301">St David's
> day</date> or ... <date i:value="--0301">St David's day</date>

Really interesting idea (that I never thought of) that yields a
very nice syntactic result. But I don't think the implications --
that these attributes somehow belong to some other markup language
than TEI -- are acceptable.