My comments on DR 10-0001

[Horton, Gareth]

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.

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.

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.  


Gareth


-----Original Message-----
From: Norbert Bollow [mailto:nb at bollow.ch] 
Sent: 08 April 2010 11:08
To: e-sc34-wg4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: Re: My comments on DR 10-0001

Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe at allette.com.au> wrote:

> OOXML:
> 
> I suggest that the same approach might be applicable for OOXML dates, if 
> I have understood the issue from the emails.
> 
> For example, this kind of text:
> 
> "Date Error Correction in spreadsheets: (Normative)
> 
> A conforming producer application must generate valid dates. A 
> conforming document must contain valid dates. A conforming consumer 
> application may provide the following limited date correction:  if the 
> day value is larger than the maximum number of days possible in that 
> month and year, treat the day as if it were an index of days from the 
> start of the given month.

What problem would this solve?

To me it sounds like exactly the opposite of the objective of finding
the most reasonable way to represent existing spreadsheet documents
that reference a non-existing day between 1900-02-28 and 1900-03-01
as if there had been a day between those two dates.

(As I wrote earlier, I agree that for the Strict conformance class,
we don't need a way to represent such documents. But for the Transitional
conformance class, a well-defined representation is needed.)

Greetings,
Norbert

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