My comments on DR 10-0001

[Jesper Lund Stocholm]

Hi Gareth (all),

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Horton, Gareth [mailto:Gareth_Horton at datawatch.com]
> Sent: 8. april 2010 14:19
> To: Norbert Bollow; e-sc34-wg4 at ecma-international.org
> Subject: RE: My comments on DR 10-0001
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> The issue is probably moot in transitional, as there is an amendment
> planned to remove ISO8601 date string representations of dates from
> spreadsheet cell values to avoid catastrophic data loss issues for
> existing applications.

+1 (yes)

> I agree with Norbert that invalid dates with respect to a defined
> subset of ISO8601 should not be persisted in the SML cell value of
> Strict documents.

+1

> Unless someone can come up with a compelling real world scenario of a
> Transitional document where the existence of the 29th February 1900 is
> critical to it's validity and continued operation when converted to a
> Strict document, I see no reason for it's inclusion in Strict.  I am
> not considering simple serial value offset issues, as they can be
> easily resolved during the conversion.

I don't think this is the right way to put it. It would be relatively easy to make a spreadsheet that would be almost impossible to /programmatically/ deduce date values for (think of a serial value formatted with a custom numFmt (number format). I certainly would not like to be the one responsible for writing that parser.

I am more interesting in a "compelling real world scenario" where a T spreadsheet MUST be transformed to S unless babies are killed. The only reason I see (off the top of my head) for insisting that all T spreadsheets MUST be (easily) convertible to S is procurement - but isn't that really out of scope for WG4?

I am looking forward to our discussion in about an hour's time.

:o)

Jesper Lund Stocholm
ciber Danmark A/S