ISO 8601 and the horrible "T"

[Walter Ian Kaye]

At 6:36p +0000 06/27/97, Misha Wolf wrote:
 > other, separated by our favourite character.  If "*" represents our
 > favourite character, we get:
 >
 >    1994-11-05*08:15:30-05:00
 >
 > instead of:
 >
 >    1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00
 >
 > The problem with this solution is precisely that it is a trick.  In
 > reality, we are dealing with a single date-with-time and it confuses
 > things to pretend that we're not.  Also, there must be lots of software
 > out there which is ISO 8601-conformant and would choke on our favourite
 > character.
 >
 > I suggest we decide that this stuff isn't primarily for human
 > consumption and make use of it, warts and all.

If it's not for human consumption, why even bother with the hyphens?
"19941105" contains all the essential data from "1994-11-05". It's
pretty clear that the hyphens are there only for humans, although in
either case there is the assumption of a Gregorian calendar (which
leads me to wonder why we don't have a code for calendar system...).

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