[Taxacom] Announcing Specify 7 for the Web

[Fred Schueler]

Quoting Bob Mesibov <mesibov at southcom.com.au>:

> A couple of minor feedback points about collecting events:

> - Your full-date format is month-day-year, all in numbers, which is  
> almost uniquely American. If Specify 7 is intended for international  
> use, why not use the ISO 8601 standard, YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY/MM/DD?
>
> - Your date entry is a single box, which allows for full date,  
> month/year or year. So would 3 boxes, one each for year, month and  
> day, and keeping these separate would greatly reduce the chances for  
> misunderstandings after export, and disasters like the famous Excel  
> stuff-up (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214330).

* collecting events can have uncertainty and duration which need to be  
expressed in various ways, since all you've got for existing  
collections is what the collector/recorder wrote down ("early May in  
1932 or so"). I've been contemplating this since 1990, and I can't see  
any alternative to having three separate variables, each set up to  
handle verbal qualifiers. I've also recently been working with  
datasets in which latitude, longitude, UTM easting and UTM northing  
are all jumbled up in two "X" and "Y" fields, which reinforced the  
horror of all-numeric dates which prompted me to work out the  
following lexographic stricture -

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Arabic months: 39% confusion. Those so burdened by the cares of life,  
writing for such a wide diversity of languages, or so bound by an  
antique Quaker refusal to name months from pagan divinities, that they  
must write the month as a number, invariably represent the month with  
a Roman numeral if they are among those who hope to be understood.  A  
corollary of this comprehensibility is that the century is invariably  
written in 4-digit Arabic notation (03/04/05, revised 06/02/07).

“Oh why to Kay?” young Arthur cried
His Merlin jumped in fright
“That future’s wrong,” to me he sighed
“A.D. two-thousand’s right.” -- Walter Onceand Kelly

(these strictures do not apply to expiry or "best before" dates, where  
the designer's goal is to conceal both the date the numbers represent,  
and especially the fact that they represent a date: "08 JA 20 2")

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the original of the nursery rhyme verse is -

“Do you herd sheep?” my Gramma  cried
My Grampa leaped in fright
“That grammar's wrong,” to me he sighed
“'Have you heard sheep?' is right.” -- Walt Kelly

fred.
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           Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
Vulnerable Watersheds - http://vulnerablewaters.blogspot.ca/
     study our books - http://pinicola.ca/books/index.htm
           RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
    on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
     (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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