REQ: ISO 8601 Comments

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 11:27 12/08/98 -0700, Don Park wrote:
>Those of us working on the XLF (Extensible Log Format) are faced with the
>issue of deciding on the timestamp format.  I thought it would be prudent to
>seek comments on the subject in general and specifically on use of the ISO
>8601 standard from the XML-DEV members.

Thanks very much for raising this, Don. It's an issue I suspect a lot of us
are wrestling with. A communal solution would be extremely valuable.

In general I suspect that most people using XLF are also going to be
dealing with date/times in other contexts so XLF should be friendly to
those. I also think that you can't necessarily rely on everyone converting
to global time (e.g. people can transcribe the time from the log but may
make mistakes when converting.) I wrote a date class for JUMBO using Java
1.02 and now it's broken because Java 1.1. uses a different approach which
I still haven't figured out - it requires the use of Calendar, etc. [1].
(all the 1.02 methods are deprecated). Dates are trickier than they look
and I wouldn't suggest that people wrote perl scripts to convert them. I
would therefore always allow raw date-times as an option (in ISO 8601
format of course).

	P.

[1] private help by e-mail gladly accepted :-)

>

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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