- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 04:35:44 +0000 (UTC)
On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Julian Reschke wrote: > Ian Hickson wrote: > > On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Julian Reschke wrote: > > > Ian Hickson wrote: > > > > > Michael(tm) Smith wrote: > > > > > > It seems pretty clear that there isn't anything else to refer > > > > > > to for the date/time parsing rules -- but to me at least, > > > > > > specifying those rules seems orthogonal to specifying the > > > > > > date/time syntax, and I would think the syntax could just be > > > > > > defined by making reference to the productions[1] in RFC 3339 > > > > > > (instead of completely redefining them), while stating any > > > > > > exceptions. > > > > > > > > > > > > [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339#section-5.6 > > > > > > > > > > > > I think the exceptions might just amount to: > > > > > > > > > > > > - the literal letters T and Z must be uppercase > > > > > Any technical reason why they have to? > > > > Not really. We just need a separator. > > > So why make it different from RFC 3339? > > > > Limiting the syntax to the simplest possible syntax was an intentional > > design choice intended to ease the burden on implementors and authors. > > In practice, pretty much every time we've made syntax > > case-insensitive, we've ended up having trouble because of it. > > If this was a totally new syntax, I would agree. > > But as something based on ISO8601 (and thereby also RFC 3339) it appears > to be a bad idea to make it less compatible just for that reason. We've seriously simplified the ISO-8601 syntax in many more ways than just this. This was a conscious design decision. > > The HTML5 spec defines exactly how to parse dates. Implementors are > > required to implement what the spec describes, so reusing libraries is > > implicitly not likely to be useful here. RFC3339 isn't even a > > particularly important one in the grand scheme of things (ISO8601 > > comes to mind as a much higher-profile example). > > I think it's unfortunate that HTML5 doesn't allow using an off-the-shelf > parser. But if it doesn't, and the temptation *will* be there to use > them, I'd recommend stating it very clearly. Done. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 21:35:44 UTC