I have just sent the appended mail to Chris Newman, author of a profile of ISO 8601 which
may be obtained from <ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-newman-datetime-01.txt>.
Misha
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Chris,
Thanks a lot for your mail. The Dublin Core (DC) effort deals with metadata for resource
discovery (see draft-kunze-dc-00.txt). The DC community is working closely with others,
eg with the authors of Cougar (the next HTML spec), with W3C's Web Collections project
and the PICS-NG project. While PICS is not designed to support human input of the data
and hence uses complete ISO 8601 date+time strings, other formats (eg metadata expressed
in HTML or XML) will have to support authoring by individuals using very simple tools.
Having advocated the use of ISO 8601 for DC's temporal fields (DATE and COVERAGE), I was
faced with the problem that ISO 8601 provides too many options. I was considering writing
a profile of ISO 8601, when a colleague drew my attention to your work. This was great
news. The one problem from the DC point of view, is that your document makes the time
portion compulsory (except for the decimal fractions of a second which are optional).
Clearly, most Internet protocols, such as mail, do require this. Metadata, though, has to
allow people to omit the time portion, if they wish to.
Now that you have some context, my previous mail will make more sense to you. I wrote
that we (the DC community) need to do one of two things:
1. Persuade you to distinguish between classes of Internet protocols: those where time is
compulsory and those where it is not.
2. Write our own Internet Draft.
We would much, much rather do the first of these! Please let us know whether you would be
willing to consider such a modification to your document.
Many thanks,
Misha
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