From: Stephen Colebourne (scolebourne@btopenworld.com)
Date: Fri Oct 21 2005 - 14:13:42 CST
George Rhoten wrote:
> 1) A lot of this data seems to be very Gregorian Calendar oriented. What
> about other calendars, like the Julian, Chinese, Hebrew and Islamic
> calendars? For example, Christmas isn't celebrated around the world on
> the same day. The Chinese New year is based on the Chinese calendar.
The format will need to specify the calendar system to use for each
rule, or perhaps it can just be defined at the organization/locale level.
> 4) You may want to add information about the level of vacation or
> observance. Some holidays are observed, and others are taken as
> vacations. For example, banks and schools stay open and celebrate on St
> Patrick's day in the US, but almost everything closes on Christmas day.
> This is a fuzzy concept, and it may be hard to quantify.
I agree, but not sure how to do this yet. If this simply becomes a
structure without data, then it will be up to the calling code to setup
the rules. However, I think some kind of priority system could be
established.
> 5) I don't quite get the concept of baseRegion. Is this a way to do
> inheritance?
Yes. For example, Northern Ireland rules are England's rules plus two
extra holidays.
> 6) How are multi-day holidays handled? For example, there is the month of
> Ramadan and the 40 days of Lent. These aren't traditional holidays, but
> these are important periods of time that are observed.
We would need to add a period attribute, such as P40D (ISO8601).
> 7) For example, Thanksgiving day in the US
> got moved several times
This is an essential:
A named holiday <day> will have a set of rules <dayRule>.
Each rule applies for either a period of time, or for a single year
fromYear/toYear/year. Where two rules conflict, year takes precedence
over fromYear/toYear. There may be no overlap of fromYear/toYear, or
duplicate year elements in a definition. The rest of the rule then
defines the other details.
> 9) The concept of state is a blurry one. Instead of using type="State",
> wouldn't type="government" be better?
Probably.
Thanks for the valuable input. One important point is that no one so far
has jumped in and said 'but that already exists', so if we need this we
definitely can't re-use data like with Olson time zones.
Stephen
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