I'm not really sure where this question/comment ought to go, but since
it came in the midst of working with XSTL 2, this seems a good place.
The data-typing-related support in XSLT 2 is based on XML Schema. So,
in both cases, a "date" is defined as YYYY-MM-DD, and anything else is
invalid. While this makes sense when you consider YYYY/MM/DD,
MM-DD-YYYY and so forth, why can't all of the following be valid dates?
YYYY-MM-DD
YYYY-MM
YYYY
This comes out of working with bibliographic data, where one typically
has issue dates of year-only, sometimes year-and-month, and only
occasionally the full "date" as understood by xs:date.
This means I have to define my own schema patterns if I write a schema,
and my own equivalents to handle the stuff in XSLT 2 if I don't want to
select the substrings.
Does nobody else find this a problem? Is there any prospect to change
it?
I'm just having a hard time understanding how I can code a schema to
enforce dates of the sort I deal with and also get the advantage of the
datatyping and XSLT 2 date formatting.
If I do:
<date year="1999" month="03"/>
... that's easy to control and flexible, but there's no format-month
function (in Saxon 8 at least).
Bruce