[XML-SIG] <url> checked and response attributes

Fred L. Drake Fred L. Drake, Jr." <fdrake@acm.org
Thu, 1 Oct 1998 11:35:33 -0400 (EDT)


Marc van Grootel writes:
 > You use the term profile. From what I read about Web collections it
 > seems this is a very loose term. Looking for an XML way of defining a
 > profile I would say Architectural Forms are an other (standardized)

  I'm not familliar with "Web collections", other than having heard
the term.  A profile, in the sense I'm using it, is simply a
description of how a standard is applied to an application.  This can
be done ease processing complexity by reducing the range of valid
input.  In the case of date formats, the profile you cite says that
only particular formats defined by a standard should be used for
date/time values on the Web, eliminating any requirement for software
to also support a range of obscure date formats that don't
meaningfully apply.  In particular, ISO 8601 also supports week-based
dates, partial dates (unspecified year, month), and periods.

 > What about the date/time attributes: follow the w3c NOTE about Date
 > and Time Formats? (ex. 1998-09-29T18:30:34-05:00)

  A profile of ISO 8601!  Yes, this is what I'm using in the Grail
implementation of XBEL.  The xml.utils.iso8601 module supports this
profile quite reasonably.


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake@acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
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