My comments on DR 10-0001

[Shawn Villaron]

Let's plan on discussing this at the 4/8 telephone conference.  I suspect we're not as far from an agreement as this thread may imply.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesper Lund Stocholm [mailto:jesper.stocholm at ciber.dk] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2010 7:38 AM
To: Jirka Kosek; Norbert Bollow
Cc: e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: My comments on DR 10-0001

Hi all,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jirka Kosek [mailto:jirka at kosek.cz]
> Sent: 1. april 2010 14:54
> To: Norbert Bollow
> Cc: e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
> Subject: Re: My comments on DR 10-0001
> 
> Norbert Bollow wrote:


> > so
> > why not at that time also add text that allows, as a special 
> > exception, the string "1900-02-29" for representing a value that 
> > occurs in some existing (buggy) documents?
> 
> Because such value is not conforming nor to ISO8601, neither to
xs:date
> datatype.

Precisely - and I am actually not aware of any tools (apart from Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc, of course) that handles the leap-year bug "nicely". Even Microsoft's own .Net library pukes when it encounters a value of "1900-02-29".

Insisting that the leap-year-bug should be allowed in documents for conformance class Strict is in my view an attempt to "legacy-enable"
Strict - and I strongly oppose that. The rationale/idea behind S was not to be able to make it as easy as possible for implementers to transform documents from T to S. The idea was to get rid of the legacy heritage of the binary document formats - yes the namespace-change itself was an indeed attempt to make the distinction between S and T as clear as possible - not least from an implementation point of view.

Trying to justify features in S based on the practicality of moving documents from T to S is in my point a misunderstanding of why S was created in the first place.

Jesper Lund Stocholm
ciber Danmark A/S