Re: ISO8601 and XML Schema dateTime

At 2001-05-08 13:59, Jeff Rafter wrote:
>1) The goes on to specify (in the lexical representation) that an optional
>+/- is allowed to precede the ISO representation of the date/time-- which is
>not in ISO 8601 that I can find-- what is the reasoning?

The negative sign is to support dates before the Christian era; it
is not clear why ISO 8601 only supports dates in the range 0001-01-01
to 9999-12-31, but for various uses both scientific and historical
we felt it was important to support a wider range.

>2) Within ISO 8601 5.4 is the combination of date (5.2) and time (5.3).  Are
>additional lexical representations using truncation permitted?

Only as provided in the datatypes spec.  (If memory serves, the answer
is no.)

>3) Fractional parts of seconds, according to 5.2 may be separated using the
>[,] comma character and that is in fact the preferred method.  Is this
>allowed wrt lexical representation of the XML Schema dateTime?

Do you mean using comma to indicate the decimal point, or do you mean
as a grouping separator if more than three fractional digits are
provided?

I believe section 3.2.7 of the datatypes spec requires a period as a
decimal marker, and allows no grouping separators among the fractional
digits, so whichever function you and/or 8601 have in mind, it's not
allowed for XML Schema's dateTime type.

>Please bear with me as I am new to date time processing and want to get it
>right.

As a user of software developed by others, I can only encourage you
in that goal!

- C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2001 22:09:41 UTC