[tei-council] ISO 8601 date representations and TEI attributes (fwd)

[Peter Boot]

The validation is not that urgent, I suppose. But while these 
iso-attributes are around, people can begin using them. It becomes 
harder to remove the ones we really don't need if we let them linger. So 
I would think it might be a good idea to have a proposal by the next 
council meeting.

Peter

David Sewell schreef:
> As this came from Syd when everyone was busy preparing for the Members
> Meeting, I've waited to forward it until now, when we may have more time
> to consider the issues he raises.
> 
> Syd has put a lot of work into considering the relation between the
> formal ISO 8601 mechanisms for representing dates/times/durations and
> the W3C Schema subset that is our primary datatype for representing them
> in the Guidelines. One question we probably need to answer before
> proceeding any farther is: how important a priority is it to sort out
> (simplify, regularize, extend, or whatever) our usage for attributes
> that take date/time information?  Genuinely understanding ISO 8601
> syntax and semantics is challenging and time-consuming. Syd is our
> resident expert on the topic (to my knowledge, unless others in the TEI
> community have similar expertise), and he is willing to put more time
> into this, but is it an optimal use of his time? (Or of mine, to the
> extent that I work with him.)
> 
> David
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2008 16:09:50 -0400
> From: Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman at Brown.edu>
> To: David Sewell <dsewell at virginia.edu>
> Subject: Re: ISO 8601 date representations and TEI attributes
> 
> [David, could you forward this to the Council? Thanks.]
> 
> A somewhat caricatured summary of the conversation so far is "do we
> really need all those *-iso= attributes?" and "maybe, but in the
> meantime we should do a better job of constraining their values".
> 
> See SF FR 2055864.[1]
> 
> To help answer the first question, I have created a table of the
> features of ISO 8601:2004 and, for most, recorded whether or not TEI
> P5 could represent the information, if not the exact syntax, without
> the *-iso= attributes.
> 
> To help us along the path to the second, I have written a program
> that generates a RELAX NG fragment for checking ISO 8601 temporal
> expressions.
> 
> Both of these have been uploaded to the SF FR as attached files.
> 
> I have also made them available on the web temporarily[2], along with
> the output of the pattern writing program and a small test schema
> that uses it[3].
> 
> Note that the patterns generated by the pattern writer are not yet
> ready to be included in the Guidelines, for several reasons.
> * not sufficiently tested
> * some patterns may be *very* slow with some cases of input
> * excludes recurring intervals because I don't understand them (not
>   really a good reason, as the syntax is clear, even if the semantics
>   aren't :-)
> * further profiling of 8601 is in order, IMHO
> 
> On that last issue, we haven't discussed what profiling of 8601 we
> should do. Some cases are obvious, e.g. that we should require the
> extended format wherever there is one. ("The basic format should be
> avoided in plain text." -- ISO 8601:2004 2.3.3.) Some are pretty
> clear, if not outright obvious (e.g., that we should avoid the
> representation of midnight with "24:00:00").
> 
> But I think there is at least one more case that ISO 8601 permits
> that we may wish to consider disallowing: representing a year with
> more than 4 digits. This capability requires that the parties involve
> negotiate and agree on how many digits the year representation will
> be expanded by, lest the result be ambiguous. Now I'm the biggest
> nay-sayer against the idea of limiting TEI or misrepresenting text in
> order to help achieve blind interchange. But in this case, it's seems
> hard to come up with use-cases of humanities texts where specifying a
> year both requires more than 4 digits (and an optional sign) and
> wouldn't be better served by the period= attribute.
> 
> Notes
> -----
> [1] https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2055864&group_id=106328&atid=644065
> [2] http://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/8601_feature_table.xhtml and
>     http://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/8601_pattern_writer.perl
> [3] http://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/iso8601pattern.rng and
>     http://bauman.zapto.org/~syd/temp/iso8601test.rng
> 
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