[pmwiki-users] Conditional Directive based on time - standards

[Jonathan Scott Duff]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 07:57:28PM +1300, Simon wrote:
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html ISO 8601 is useful.
> 
> I suggest that dates be formatted yyyy-mm-dd
> and could we also allow times, eg hh:mm    (24 hour time of course)

The dashes don't do anything for me but I can see how following an
international standard would be a good thing.  

> I also support allowing for yyyy
> and yyyy-mm
> where it is understood that this is the "last" or highest day of that 
> time interval is used
> 
> My suggestions
> 
> (: if date future "2005-10-13 21:00" :)
> (:if date past 2004-09-09 :)

What do "future" and "past" mean exactly?  What mnemonic value do they
have to WikiAuthors?    I can almost see "past" as useful to mean "If
we're past this date", but otherwise I don't think there's any value
of marking a date as being in the past or future because a human can
look at it an tell (besides, dates marked in the future will be marked
quite badly once that date has past :-)

> (:if date between yyyy-mm-dd yyyy-mm-dd :) (:comment assumed to be 
> inclusive:)

Does between include or exclude the end points?  Given

	(:if date between 2005-10-13 2005-10-15 :)

does that include Oct 13 and Oct 15 such that the conditional is true
for 3 days or does it exclude them such that the conditional is true
only for Oct 14?

> and optionally after any date you can have
> + n {year month week day hour minute second}
> if not specified assumes days
> eg
> (: if date between 2004-11-09 2004-11-09 + 4 weeks:)

The extra redundancy is a little bothersome there.  Since we're
already talking about 2004-11-09, why mention it twice?  How about a
notation like this

	(:if date 2004-11-09,+4weeks :)

to mean the same as you have above.

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at pobox.com