Draft for review: ISO 8601 date work on IS 29500

[Chris Rae]

Hello Murata-san - thanks for taking a look at this. Your technical change looks like a good idea - it would certainly be a simple way of expressing the restriction.

On your tiny technical proposal, I am much less keen. "Z" denotes UTC, and is as much a time zone as "-09:00". ISO 8601 allows times with no time zone whatsoever ("local times") and so Gareth and I are proposing we allow only those.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) [mailto:eb2m-mrt at asahi-net.or.jp] 
Sent: 13 July 2010 17:16
To: Chris Rae
Cc: e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org; Horton, Gareth
Subject: Re: Draft for review: ISO 8601 date work on IS 29500

I have an editorial comment and a tiny technical proposal.

Editorial comment

In my understanding, our subsetting is similar to what W3C XML Schema Part 2, W3C Date and Time Formats (technical note), RFC 3339 (Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps) are doing.  The only significant difference is that our subset does not have timezone, since no well-known spreadsheet implementations provide timezone.  If this is the case, why don't we say so in the beginning of this draft?

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xmlschema-2-20041028
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339

Tiny technical proposal

I am wondering if we should append "Z" always as the last character when we specify time information.  RFC 3339 mandates "Z" or explicit timezone.  
RFC 4287 (The Atom Syndication Format), which uses RFC 3339, does the same thing.  The following three lines are extracted from RFC 3339.

 date-time       = full-date "T" full-time
 full-time       = partial-time time-offset
 time-offset     = "Z" / time-numoffset



Cheers,
Makoto