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Re: Last Call: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps to Proposed Standard

2001-11-12 07:30:03
Doug Royer wrote:

Why not just specify that dates/times are RFC2445 compliant?
[...]
We decided on ONE format for date time based on ISO-8601

               YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS [+/- ...]

Not quite; RFC-2445 doesn't have the UTC offset.  (See section 4.3.5 of 
RFC-2445; at the bottom of page 35, it says, "The form of date and time with 
UTC offset MUST NOT be used".)  This was 
debated in the IMPP group; some suggested forgetting about timezones and 
just specifying that all timestamps had to be in UTC.  The counterargument 
was that knowing somebody's timezone offset helps you guess whether he's 
likely to be in the office, etc.

I did argue for using the pure-numeral form from RFC2445, until it was 
pointed out that we had to add the offset, which meant breaking 
compatibility with 2445 anyway.

/=============================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer          |
|jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)com   |Incentive Systems, Inc.     |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.     |
|=============================================================|
|I used to belong to a solipsism club, but I got bored & voted|
|everybody else out.                                          |
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