Guidelines

Guidelines

These are the guidelines for contributors. Guidelines are important in order to create a good international standard for holidays in the xml format.

• Guidelines
  • Filenames
    • Examples
  • Encoding
  • Holiday Definitions
  • Schema Changes
  • Comments and References
  • Subversion Commits

Filenames

A file containing holiday definitions should be as follows:

holidays_<code>.xml

The filename has to start with the name "holidays", followed by an underscore. <code> means an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code that represents the country where the holidays are applicable to. Note that the code should be put in lowercase characters in order to avoid potential problems on some particular filesystems and Operating Systems (Windows and OS X). If there is no ISO code available, it is ok to select an obvious abbreviation for the country. "shared" and "all" are reserved codes in order to represent special holiday definition files.

Examples

• holidays_de.xml - contains holiday definitions for Germany
• holidays_us.xml - contains holiday definitions for the USA
• holidays_shared.xml - may contain holiday definitions that could be included by other *.xml files
• holidays_all.xml - includes many holiday*.xml files

Encoding

The encoding of the XML files should be UTF-8 in order to be locale independent. Please make sure to use an editor that is able to handle UTF-8 correctly.

Holiday Definitions

For reliable holiday definitions, we recommend to search in paper books, ebooks and on multiple web sites. Don't rely only on one reference. Only add a holiday defintion if you are sure about it. If you are unsure about a definition, please put it only as a comment. Others might be able to change vague definitions into reliable definitions. If you cannot define a holiday properly with the existing schema, we may need to extend the schema.

Schema Changes

If you think a schema change is the only way in order to define a particular holiday, please let the xml-holidays team know. We are happy to discuss those cases with you. Please don't change the schema without a discussion.

Comments and References

If applicable add comments and references. Both text from free websites and URLs to free websites are preferred, e.g. links to Wikipedia (and again, please don't rely only on one source of information). Only put non-copyrighted text as comment. Ask a copyright holder for explicit permission if the material is copyrighted.

Subversion Commits

Before committing a XML to the SVN repository, please validate the XML first.