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Lincoln replies to a previous dialogue: >> How one choses to write these things is not as important as an INDIRECT >> standard for their interpretation. We in America are going to go right >> on writing our dates MM/DD/YYYY even though everyone in Europe uses >> DD/MM/YYYY... but if one knows that, then the parse is simple. The >> British >> will continue to drive on the "other" side of the road, and we will >> continue to use Farenheit and feet and inches (and the Brits "stone?"). >> If one knows by tagging or labeling what has been done, it doesn't take >> much artificial intelligence to calculate an equivalent. and Freriks responds: >Correct. >The solution is to 'invent' a coding system which will indicate which >system was used. But now there is none. The matter is a bit more complicated across language boundaries, but I suspect that one needs something like <DATE type = US> as an attribute that is directly readable, so that it is easy to make an application "aware" even if it has not been previously included. Tom %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%