- From: Gavin Treadgold <gt@kestrel.co.nz>
- Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:48:02 +1300
- To: public-xg-eiif <public-xg-eiif@w3.org>
On 2008-11-26, at 1318, C H wrote: > "Some local" is nowhere near acceptable for the purposes we are > talking about. Especially not as relief efforts begin to span > global communications networks. With the "Z" suffix that specifies > that the time is in UTC it's fine for points in time - only. But > ISO 8601 has nothing to say about how to specify spans of time / > intervals, floating durations, etc. ISO8601 is perfectly capable of reflecting time zones by using +1300 to represent NZDT for example. I think it is important to recognise that ISO8601 is primarily an atomic standard, in that it generally defines an atomic datetime unit (as you rightly point out). It is then up to standards that build upon ISO8601 to implement more complex functionality such as you suggest e.g. ranges, intervals etc. > ISO 8601 apparently allows one to express the non-existent concept > of a date/time without being fixed in any one time zone. This is a > plain semantic error, to allow the expression of something that > seems to exist but in fact is ambiguous. I would suggest this is a programmers error - in that users don't generally enter datetimes in ISO8601 format, rather the programme saves it as such. Therefore, it is a design error on behalf of the programmer that they store it as local time rather than fully specifying the UTC offset. Plain lazy development. Of course, closing that loophole in the standard may improve lazy development practices ;) Cheers Gav
Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 00:48:51 UTC