[DAS] Re: das/2 proposal status

[Dave Howorth]

Andrew Dalke wrote:
> Lincoln:
>  >  Dates should follow  the HTTP date specification.
> 
> RFC 2068 (HTTP/1.1) allows three different formats
<snip>
> I would prefer the DAS spec be more specific about which
> of those is allowed.  I think it's okay to say "RFC 1123 with
> 4 digit years".  We can pin this down later.

I would like to make an alternative suggestion. The DAS documents in 
which these dates appear are XML documents so it seems to me more 
natural to require that dates follow XML standards rather than HTTP ones.

XML dates are defined in <http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/>, broadly as 
  1999-10-26 for a date or 2000-03-04T20:00:00Z for a dateTime. I would 
suggest mandating the canonical representations.

This format has several advantages over the earlier complex textual ones:
* Dates can be compared directly as strings with no need for parsing,
* Dates are easier to parse when it is necessary,
* They don't require non-English speakers to learn abbreviations,
* XML defines rules for interpretation and comparison.


> That should probably be 'name' instead of 'id'.  For consistency's
> sake since 'id' seems otherwise always used for resolvable URIs.

In the context of an XML document, I think the use of 'id' attributes 
for values that are not of ID type is very misleading. In the case of 
resolvable URIs, why not use the tag 'url' instead? And use 'name' as 
Andrew suggests in other cases.

Cheers, Dave
-- 
Dave Howorth
MRC Centre for Protein Engineering
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH
01223 252960