Issue: Should the datetime attribute be ISO 8601 compatable?

I mentioned this earlier in one of my comments about expanding the set of allowable datetime strings to include some addition strings allowed under ISO 8601, but this is sufficiently different I wished to make certain that those who had tuned out from the earlier discussion were aware of this concern by repeating it in a separate thread.

At present the HTML 5 draft version extends the allowed syntax of the datetime value from that used in HTML 4 / XHTML 1 to include strings that are not valid ISO 8601 specifiers.  Specifically, it breaks syntax allowed by ISO 8601 by allowing optional whitespace.  I can to some degree see the value of allowing whitespace where the textContent of the <time> element is being parsed instead of the datetime attribute.  However, for the attribute itself, unless an existing implementation is accepting extra whitespace when parsing the datetime attribute of <ins> and <del> in HTML 4, I can't see the value in accepting whitespace for the attributes.

Ernest Cline