Since Helsinki, there has been much discussion of date ranges. The
DC.Coverage folks have hitherto opted for distinct t.min and t.max values,
while the DC.Date folks have preferred a single string encompassing the
entire date range. Arguments advanced on both sides have seemed to me to
focus on metadata encoded using HTML's meta elements. Please remember that
in XML (and, hence, in RDF) it will be easy to write something like (it
probably won't look precisely like this):
<DC:Date>
<DC:DateMin>1997-01-01</DC:DateMin>
<DC:DateMax>1997-12-31</DC:DateMax>
</DC:Date>
Andrew Layman of Microsoft, who is a prominent member of the XML and RDF
communities, has written to the RDF Syntax WG list, opposing the encoding of
a date range in a single item of data.
While I can't stop anyone from spending their valuable time thinking of
syntactic tricks to allow lots of meaning to be squeezed into a single data
string, www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime is there for the entire Web community,
not just for the Dublin Coders.
It is an entirely different matter if the DC community states that it has
a requirement that, say, data ranges be expressible using RDF. I'm sure
that can be accommodated. It would probably fall within the scope of the
RDF Schema WG, to be set up shortly.
Please note also that it will soon be possible to embed RDF in an HTML
document. So you're not being asked to wait for long.
Comments?
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Misha Wolf Email: [log in to unmask] 85 Fleet Street
Standards Manager Voice: +44 171 542 6722 London EC4P 4AJ
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12th International Unicode Conference, 8-9 Apr 1998, Tokyo, www.unicode.org
7th World Wide Web Conference, 14-18 Apr 1998, Brisbane, www7.conf.au
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