From: Edward H. Trager (ehtrager@umich.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 20 2005 - 19:49:46 CST
> >organizations. Additionally, there may exist "extra" days that don not
> >exist every year (for example if some normally worked monday falls
> >between a normally non-worked sunday and a non-worked holiday) that
> >cause some businesses to be closed as well, or have limited activity
> >(hink about stocks exchanges). Whever these days will exist may vary
> >over time, and often without legal status, depending on rules applied in
> >each organization.
>
> Indeed, so part of the aim of this is to define an XML structure that
> companies can define their own rules into. This is definitely not just
> locale specific data.
So, would this XML structure be advertised or promoted for use by
national and local governments and various religious authorities world wide ?
Will there be a proposal to create a system of internet servers that provide the
correct "holiday" information, similar to the way NIST's Internet Time Service
is designed to provide the correct time to my computer? I think that such a
service would definitely be *the* way to go. So, for example, if I wanted to
know the correct dates for Rammadan, which requires an actual sighting of the
moon by a religious authority and therefore no amount of computer computation
is going to ever help (although a lot of computer scientists in the Muslim
world would like to see the rules redefined so that computers could have accurate
Hijiri calendars), all a user would have to do is be sure that his computer periodically
queried one of the servers of the correct religious authority.
The same thing would go for secular holidays defined at local, state, or national
levels, school terms and school holidays, etc. : just point your computer at the
right set of servers, and, voila!, your computer's calendar software gets populated
with accurate, up-to-date secular and religious holiday, school spring break
and semester finals information. Is the project discussing doing something on
this scale?
- Ed Trager
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