[XML-SIG] A bit off topic: XML advice needed...

[Walter Underwood]

At 09:07 PM 3/3/99 +1100, Stuart Hungerford wrote:
>
>Anyways, suppose I have a DTD that describes elements for
>dates, and in particular the <date> element. Now suppose I 
>want to re-use my <date> element definition in a DTD for
>marking up "events".  Each event has a start date and end
>date. (Please forgive any terminology errors here).

A different approach is to use a date-range format in the data,
rather than in the XML. Here is an ISO 8601 time period with 
a specific start date:

  <date-range>1985-04-12T23:20:50/P1Y2M15DT12H</date-range>

That is a period that starts at 23:20:50 on 12 April 1985, and
lasts for one year, two montsh, 15 days, and 12 hours.

See a summary of the ISO spec here:

   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

ISO 8601:1988 here:

   http://www.iso.ch/markete/8601.pdf

and ISO 8601:1998 (draft) here:

   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/8601v04.pdf

W3.org recommends a subset of the ISO date format for web use.
That subset ("profile") is online at www.w3.org, somewhere.
It does not include the part of the spec dealing with time
periods.

wunder



--
Walter R. Underwood
wunder@infoseek.com
wunder@best.com (home)
http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product)
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
1-408-543-6946