[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Names, Dates, Etc.
At 02:35 PM 1/13/99 -0500, John Cowan wrote: >> [I]s there any similar movement for NameML, DateML, >> or CurrencyML? Or are we going to be stuck with 50 different formats for >> each of those? > >For all of these, we need architectures rather than markup languages >per se, because applications may need more than one name, date, >or money amount. Applications will indeed need more than one name, date, or money amount - but will they need the information in multiple formats within the same document? Or would they rather get all names in a NameML format, all dates in a DateML format, and all currency in a CurrencyML format? Implementing these as architectures is fine with me, if you want to spare the odd element - but seeing them formally defined is most important. (And since XSL doesn't seem to support architectural forms, explaining the architectural approach itself to newcomers will be fun.) >The format of dates is nicely specified by a profile of ISO 8601, >http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime-970915.html , which is a W3 Note. >So one convention would be to make any element that has a >"date" attribute with that value (or some simpler one preferably) >has mixed content in that format. Similar tricks can be played >with the other two cases. This is possible, certainly - I'd like to see something more formal, more thoroughly XML. Dates at least may be covered as a data type by a schema of some sort, which could then point to that NOTE without much difficulty. >As for the actual content, a name element should have the name >as its content, and a "surname" attribute to indicate the thing >to sort on, search for, e.g. > > <recipient surname="stlaurent">Simon St. Laurent</recipient> > >This is the most culturally neutral form. The term "surname" comes >from X.500 Person, and is admitted to be a bit misleading. >Bits about last name, first name, etc. are very culture specific. I spend a lot of time in my books apologizing about name formatting - first name and surname don't make sense in too many contexts. Family Name usually means something, unless you're in Iceland, and even there it's a mix. I'd really like to see something hammered out more formally. >For currencies there are two items(*), the 3-letter ISO 4217 currency >code (see http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/iso4217-en.html) >and the amount expressed as a decimal fraction (with the >international decimal point ",", please, not the North American >full stop). > >I would recommend the currency code as an attribute >and the value as element content, but there is a case to be made >for representing them both as attributes and a properly formatted >version (like "$32.45" for USD or "32$45" for PTE or >"\u20AC32.45" for XEU). This sounds promising - I could probably even learn to pronounce , as point given some practice - but again, we need to get this made some kind of standard that people can find and use. These seem like issues outside of the W3C's oversight - maybe they belong at ISO, or maybe someone else should take a look. Maybe the W3C's i18n folks could look at it. Leaving this information to chance seems like a good way to create enormous frustration in the long run, reducing the touted 'lowered costs' of XML as more and more incompatible formats describing similar things arise. Simon St.Laurent XML: A Primer / Cookies Sharing Bandwidth Building XML Applications (March) http://www.simonstl.com xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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