Names, Dates, Etc.

[Andrew Layman]

The idea to build on existing standards is a good one.  As Simon says below,
there are standards for dates (e.g. ISO 8601) and a number of other
notations.  

Some of the issues raised here are being addressed in the XML "datatypes"
effort.  One key thing to keep in mind is the distinction between a datatype
in the sense of a notation (e.g. ISO 8601) versus structured element
content, which is more a matter of standard element types, and is an area in
which Namespaces should help people construct and organize standard
libraries of element types.

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl at simonstl.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 1999 12:51 PM
To: XML-Dev Mailing list
Subject: Re: Names, Dates, Etc.


At 12:34 PM 2/6/99 -0800, David LeBlanc wrote:
>How about a novel idea: use the ISO standards for those things where they
>exist. I'm pretty sure there's an ISO standard for dates for example.

The problem isn't that there are no standards for dates - there certainly
is an ISO date standard (8601) - but that there is no standard for
representing dates in XML.  Where does the date go in an element?  Should
it be a single string in an attribute, in element content, broken into
year/month/day, or something else creative?

Dates are the easiest because they have been thoroughly serialized (by the
ISO and others) and because schemas are likely to reference them.

Names and currency are both more complicated, as are other 'basic' things
like phone numbers and (especially) addresses.  If someone's really
standardized these items, especially if they've done it in XML, I'd love to
know.  X.500's done some on the directory information front, but I haven't
seen much call for using that framework in XML.  Maybe we'll go that way.
Who knows?

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Cookies
Sharing Bandwidth 
Building XML Applications (March)
http://www.simonstl.com

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