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RE: Last Call: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps to Propo sed Standard

2001-11-10 08:20:01
-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Royer [mailto:Doug(_at_)ROYER(_dot_)COM]
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 6:36 PM

The iCalendar date-time format is restricted to exactly one
representation of date-time (not optional spaces, dashes, ...).
There was a large debate on this before rfc2445 came out.
We decided on ONE format for date time based on ISO-8601

      YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS [+/- ...]

If the intent is to be human readable - both loose.
If the intent is to be machine readable - why another similar format?

One possible issue involves incompatibility with standard formats defined by
other organizations, such as the W3C.  XML Schema (for example) defines a
date-time format [1] per ISO-8601's extended form; the shorter format
described in RFC2445 and ISO-8601 is invalid per XML Schema.  If the IETF
were to "require" RFC2445-compliant date-time values in protocols we'd be
imposing a format that restricts use of XML Schema (and who knows what else)
in protocol design.  The formats specified in this new document provide some
flexibility that may be useful in varied date-time specification contexts.

-Scott-

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime



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