On Fri, 25 Jul 1997, Robin Martherus wrote:
> I have been lurking on this list for about a year now and would like to get
> some input from you regarding ISO8601. My company wants to use the Dublin
> Core tags in one of our products. We would also like to use ISO8601 for
> storing dates in the DC.date tag as well as other date related fields but
> find the profile is lacking in the year area because it is limited to the
> years from 0000 to 9999.
Proposed new date format (1):
Time shall be represented as a positive real number of seconds since
the Big Bang.
This representation accords with the use of degrees Kelvin for measuring
temperature.
(Conversion errors may apply since the exact time of the big bang
is not accurately known ...)
Proposed date format (2):
Unix time; what else? Time is measured in seconds since 1 January 1970.
Pre-Unix time may be represented using negative numbers.
- on a more serious note, most date software is incapable of
dealing correctly with early dates due to calendar reform, etc.
It may be necessary to introduce a "calendar" scheme :-( .... at least
with "Unix time" you know where you are, even if you can't figure out
whether Christ was born in January 0001 or February 0000 ....
.. I'm a bit embarrassed at not having spotted this problem myself ...
Andrew
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