Subject: [xsl] Re: format-date() and negative (BCE) dates From: "Martin Holmes gtxxgm-xsl-list-2@xxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 18:58:49 -0000 |
On Tue, 2014-05-06 at 23:50 +0000, Martin Holmes gtxxgm-xsl-list-2@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The proleptic Gregorian doesn't, I agree, make much sense when it's extended this far back, but the project I'm working on is an early modern one, and most of our date-conversion functions convert between Julian and Gregorian.
It's worth mentioning for the sake of people thinking the Julian calendar is convenient in general that different countries adopted the Gregorian calendar at different times - as late as the 1930s for Greece, 1752 in the UK, 16th Century for much of Roman Catholic Europe, and an even more complex picture in the Americas.
The other historical form commonly seen is to date events in terms of people, usually monarchs. E.g. 3 Geo III would be the third year of the reign of George III, although as far as I can tell the usual year end was employed, so that the years were measured in England (say) from April 1st, not from the coronation or accession date.
Older dates tagged as Julian also come in for the same conversion. You're right that it's ambiguous, though; this page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar> shows a table in which 1BC Julian is equivalent to 1BC Gregorian, but it also appears to suggest that ISO 8601 is somehow equivalent to proleptic Gregorian.
It is also overly simplistic, for the reasons I already mentioned. Since dates don't usually mention the calendar to which they conform, you have to add context. And, of course, a visitor from France to England writing home would most likely use the French calendar of the time, perhaps eventually switching after staying in England more than a year or two.
There's a book on Calendrical Calculations, although I seem to remember that it's awfully proprietary, in that the author claims ownership of the algorithms. But it looked as if it might be helpful.
Cheers, Martin
Liam
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