> On Wed 12-Mar-2003 at 05:12:50PM +0100, Thomas Baker wrote:
> >
> > The modeling issue is whether it makes sense to qualify the
> > literal "2003-03-12" with "en-US", and Jon seems to confirm what I
> > had suspected -- that it doesn't really "make sense"...
>
> My fear would be that it might give the impression that the
> following is OK and that these are the same date...
>
> <dc:date xml:lang="en-US">11-09-2001</dc:date>
>
> <dc:date xml:lang="en-UK">09-11-2001</dc:date>
>
> I realise that we (the people on this list) won't get confused about
> this (we all know that only W3CDTF dates are valid) but other people
> might get the impression that the xml:lang attribute makes a
> difference to the date format...
Indeed.
Simple acid test: Is this a piece of American English text? No, it isn't,
therefore it isn't en-US.
W3CDTF dates aren't even geared towards human-readers, while human-readable
it would generally be best to translate it to a localised format for
end-users.
Besides, most applications looking for "en-US" should look for "en" if it
can't find American English, then look for "en-*"[1], then "i-default", then
something with no language, then either assume nothing is available or
prompt the user with which languages it can provide information in (the
latter would depend strongly on the purpose of the application). Basic
send-strict receive-liberal surely?
[1] Obviously there'd be nothing wrong in it applying rules like "en-IE is
closer to en-GB than en-US if it can.
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