If anyone is working specifically on P5 representations of TEI elements
connected with dates, times, and durations, could you drop me a note
off-line before I bore the entire list with a lot of perplexed

In the long run we're going to be dealing with multiple publications
consisting of many documents to which exact or approximate dates are
assigned (correspondence, memos, presidential papers, etc.). We'll be
needing to build search functions that can retrieve documents based on
exact dates or user-specified date intervals.

There are lots of complicating issues, for example the fact that the
datatypes defined in XML Schema (and therefore the basis for data types
in XQuery and XSLT 2.0) do not implement the full array of ISO 8601
syntax, so for example a date range like "1834-05-15/1834-05-15" is not
a legal xs:date expression but would instead have to be pre-processed to
divide it into two separate dates. TEI P4 of course offers separate
<date> and <dateRange> elements, but having to be able to deal with
either form when processing a dateline is going to add complexity to the
coding of search functions.

There was a good TEI-L thread on this a couple of years ago:


David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
Electronic Imprint, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Email: [log in to unmask]   Tel: +1 434 924 9973