Draft profile of ISO 8601

Walter Ian Kaye walter at natural-innovations.com
Sun Jun 22 00:24:09 UTC 1997


At 10:04p +0000 06/20/97, Misha Wolf wrote:

 > Granularity options 2-4
 > -----------------------
 >
 > The missing portions are deemed to be equal to zero.  Thus the following all
 > represent the same date/time:
 >
 >    1997-06-20T12:34Z
 >    1997-06-20T12:34:00Z
 >    1997-06-20T12:34:00.00Z
 >    1997-06-20T12:34:00.000000000000000000000000000Z
 >
 > Granularity option 1
 > --------------------
 >
 > An isolated date is treated as if it had the following string appended:
 >
 >    T12:00Z
 >
 > For example:
 >
 >    1997-06-20
 >
 > is treated as if it were:
 >
 >    1997-06-20T12:00Z
 >
 > This approach, proposed by Charles Wicksteed, has the advantage that at
 > 1997-06-20T12:00Z, most of the world would agree that the current date is
 > 1997-06-20.
 >
 > Comments?

I think the "equal to zero" method is safer (and more compatible with
existing software). Since am/pm is not being used, the danger of
noon/midnight ambiguity does not exist, and thus there is no need for
any special treatment.

__________________________________________________________________________
  Walter Ian Kaye <boo_at_best*com>    Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter





More information about the tz mailing list