content, format, ctype, or xtype ?

[Doug Tody]

On Wed, 13 May 2009, Francois Ochsenbein wrote:

> (a) Do we need a new attribute to specify an ISO-8601-formatted time ?
>    The possible answers are:
>	...
>    (a5) No, use a special unit (e.g. unit='"iso8601"')

This appears to be a quite limited problem hence may not require a
general solution: thus far only iso8601 and stc-s have come up as
use cases.  A number of people have suggested the simple option of
overloading unit for these one or two special cases, plus evidently
this is already done in practice in some cases.  While not elegant
this may suffice to help an application easily determine how to deal
with such values.  In cases such as iso8601, stc-s, or even hms/dms
the physical unit would seem to be specified indirectly by interpreting
these well known representations.  Given that the problem is so limited
perhaps this simple solution would suffice without having to invent
a new piece of metadata.  If not, we need a better argument for why
a more complicated solution is required.

 	- Doug