# zotero dates and csl
**URL:** https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/zotero-dates-and-csl/410
**Category:** CSL Development
**Created:** [January 16, 2008, 8:08pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/zotero-dates-and-csl/410 "2008-01-16T20:08:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2008, 8:08pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/zotero-dates-and-csl/410/1 "2008-01-16T20:08:20Z")
Elena,
> I’ve looked on the list and the forums and still didn’t find the
> solution to citing dates such as these in CSL:
>
> Summer 1990
> Fall-Winter 1989-1990
> ca. 1204
> 1940?
> [1940]
> 2-3 c. BCE
>
> Is there a plan for these?
There’s been sporadic discussion about some of this in different
places, but not really.
Some ideas on the data encoding end in this thread:
[http://groups.google.com/group/bibliographic-ontology-specification-group/browse\_thread/thread/e2abf150a58530/55f9ac3cd34daa3f?lnk=gst&q=bc#55f9ac3cd34daa3f](http://groups.google.com/group/bibliographic-ontology-specification-group/browse_thread/thread/e2abf150a58530/55f9ac3cd34daa3f?lnk=gst&q=bc#55f9ac3cd34daa3f)
This isn’t entirely disconnected from CSL, since formatting works best
with standard dates. It might suggest that implementations should know
which localized strings to add for BCE or ca. dates, but I don’t think
that needs to be in a CSL file. Do you?
The “other” dates stuff probably does need explicit support; maybe a
new attribute value on the date-part element?
Bruce
---
### Author:  [@Elena\_Razlogova](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Elena_Razlogova)
#### Post date: [January 17, 2008, 2:45am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/zotero-dates-and-csl/410/2 "2008-01-17T02:45:00Z")
> Elena,
>
> > I’ve looked on the list and the forums and still didn’t find the
> > solution to citing dates such as these in CSL:
> >
> > Summer 1990
> > Fall-Winter 1989-1990
> > ca. 1204
> > 1940?
> > [1940]
> > 2-3 c. BCE
> >
> > Is there a plan for these?
>
> There’s been sporadic discussion about some of this in different
> places, but not really.
>
> Some ideas on the data encoding end in this thread:
>
> \<[http://groups.google.com/group/bibliographic-ontology-specification-group/browse\_thread/thread/e2abf150a58530/55f9ac3cd34daa3f?lnk=gst&q=bc#55f9ac3cd34daa3f](http://groups.google.com/group/bibliographic-ontology-specification-group/browse_thread/thread/e2abf150a58530/55f9ac3cd34daa3f?lnk=gst&q=bc#55f9ac3cd34daa3f)
>
> >
>
> This isn’t entirely disconnected from CSL, since formatting works best
> with standard dates. It might suggest that implementations should know
> which localized strings to add for BCE or ca. dates, but I don’t think
> that needs to be in a CSL file. Do you?
In the long run maybe localization can be done on the Zotero end, but
it seems a long ways away.
After discussing this with Dan S., it seems like the simplest way to
go for now is to set “is-date” to return “false” if the date field
contains any additional data (such as “ca.,” a hyphen, brackets,
question mark, etc.), and fallback to the whole string otherwise.
[https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/888](https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/888)
Does this make sense?
For BCE dates, something will still need to be done for sorting, since
2 BCE should be sorted before 1 CE–I don’t think this works properly
right now.
Elena