Standards

[Markus Kuhn]

"Infoman Inc." wrote on 1999-01-28 14:46 UTC:
> I am a Canadian participant in ISO TC154 standardization work with respect
> to ISO 8601 Representation of Dates and Times as well as ...

Ah, good. Is there a newer draft of ISO 8601 available than the
one on <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/8601v04.pdf> that
Louis Visser has sent me exactly a year ago?

The draft that I have still says (and did over many revisions) in
awkwardly long-winded language that

  NOTE: To be precise, it should be mentioned that the naming and
  numbering of the days of the week correspond with assigning to
  the date of 2000-01-01 the name Wednesday.

This will cause a major disruption of our calendar system, because >90%
of all computers in operation still believe that my 29th birthday will
be a Saturday and not a Wednesday ... ;-)

Unnecessary to say that ISO 8601:1999 still needs a lot of
proof-reading.

> Can any of you help me out on this? Have some ideas? Are any of you aware of
> "standardised" approaches/implementations for date/time stamping services
> currently in existence that can/should serve as input into the development
> of an international standard?, etc.

My accumulated, condensed, and distilled knowledge on this topic
is embedded in

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/c-time/
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

where you will also find numerous pointers to relevant literature.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>