ISO 8601 and the horrible "T"

Stu Weibel has given me permission to quote from his private mail:

> Where you have YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm-hh:mm, is it possible to interpose a
> seperator other than T that makes it clearer to the human eye where 
> the date ends and Time begins?  I suspect the answer to this is that 
> such a separator would knock the profile out of whack with 8601, but 
> I thought I'd ask anyhow.

The "T" is, I think, the most despised aspect of the ISO 8601 standard
but I think we're stuck with it.  Some relevant quotes from the
standard:

   [T] is used as a time designator to indicate the start of the 
   representation of the time of day in combined date and time of day 
   expressions;

   The space character shall not be used in the representations.

The only suggestion I have seen for getting rid of the "T" is a kind of
trick: We say that we are representing not a "combined date and time"
but rather a separate date and a time.  We then place them next to each
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.

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Misha Wolf            Email: misha.wolf@reuters.com     85 Fleet Street
Standards Manager     Voice: +44 171 542 6722           London EC4P 4AJ
Reuters Limited       Fax  : +44 171 542 8314           UK

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Received on Friday, 27 June 1997 14:13:53 UTC