From: Stephen Colebourne (scolebourne@btopenworld.com)
Date: Fri Oct 21 2005 - 07:45:46 CST
I am at work at present, and don't have time to
respond to all these good points. However....
> 7) Since it's hard to find a design document or the
> DTD of this subject on
> the sourceforge.net site, I'll make a guess that the
> "year" attribute
> means that holiday happens once
Yes
>, while "fromYear" happens more than once.
> Is there a "toYear" attribute?
Yes
I attached the DTD to the original mail, but I don't
think it got through. See
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/joda-time/JodaTimeContrib/holiday/src/java/org/joda/time/contrib/holiday/src/
for the CVS DTD. Please bear in mind that this CVS is
essentially a whiteboard area at this point, and there
is no fomal design process.
> 8) Instead of using things like "Wales" for an
> identifier, have you
> considered using ISO-3166-2 or even LOCODE from the
UN?
I didn't know there were region codes! Looks v useful
for this task.
The identifier is a key and difficult aspect. Time
zones have settled on Continent/City, such as
Europe/London, but holiday data seems trickier to
classify than this...
Stephen
--- George Rhoten <grhoten@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> I have a few comments on this information.
>
> 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.
>
> 2) How would Indian weekends be handled? The
> weekend data is already in
> CLDR, but CLDR doesn't quite handle Indian weekends
> that are variable in
> length depending on the time of the month.
>
> 3) I really recommend that you don't use the term
> "country" in any of your
> elements. You should consider using something like
> "region" and
> "subregion", or "territory" and "subterritory". Not
> all ISO-3166 codes
> are countries. Implying that all ISO-3166 codes are
> countries tends to
> annoy certain country governments controlling
> certain territories. It
> implies that some territories are self governing.
>
> 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.
>
> 5) I don't quite get the concept of baseRegion. Is
> this a way to do
> inheritance?
>
> 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.
>
> 7) Since it's hard to find a design document or the
> DTD of this subject on
> the sourceforge.net site, I'll make a guess that the
> "year" attribute
> means that holiday happens once, while "fromYear"
> happens more than once.
> Is there a "toYear" attribute? For example,
> Thanksgiving day in the US
> got moved several times
>
(http://www.loc.gov/wiseguide/nov02/thanks-when.html).
> While Thanksgiving
> day is uniform at the moment, other holidays may
> change like this in the
> future.
>
> 8) Instead of using things like "Wales" for an
> identifier, have you
> considered using ISO-3166-2 or even LOCODE from the
> UN?
>
(http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/04background-on-iso-3166/iso3166-2.html)
>
> While it doesn't cover all countries around the
> world, it may be
> something to think about.
>
> 9) The concept of state is a blurry one. Instead of
> using type="State",
> wouldn't type="government" be better?
>
> Overall, it's all an interesting and tough problem
> to solve.
>
> George Rhoten
> IBM Globalization Center of Competency/ICU San
> José, CA, USA
> http://www.icu-project.org/
> http://icu.sourceforge.net/
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