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Hi,

I must admit that I have not followed the discussion the last month, so
I may have missed something. The current draft at
http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/spec.html looks better than a few
month ago, thanks to all who contributed in improving the planned
standard. 

However, in the current form the draft is just a list of examples with
some description. Some of us already asked for a formal specification in
Backus-Naur-Form or about an implementation, but it looks like the
current standardization process is going on detached from technical
feasability (?). I fear that without a formal specification and some
implementation, the format will end up as one-way data hole or as
incomplete boilerplate of faulty applications.

I started to write a parser, based on a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG)
- the most difficult part seem to be the gaps and inconsistencies in the
current draft. Maybe this project is of use for anyone interested to dig
deeper: https://github.com/nichtich/lua-edtf I stopped the work after a
got the basic framework because my main interest is not EDTF. If you
don't like Lua or PEG, you can also use another formalism, but EDTF
needs a formal definition or you cannot call it a "standard" or
"specification" at all.



Jakob Voss


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