🚀 go-pugleaf

Gordon Irlam <gordoni@berlioz.ua.oz> writes:
|
|   A fairly common date/time format on the Internet is that used in
|   RFC 822.  It looks something like this.
|
|       20 Jun 91 15:48:18 GMT
|
|   Unfortunately this date/time format has several disadvantages:
|
|       - It doesn't include the century.  (What will happen to Usenet on
|	  the 1st of January 2000?)

The IETF Host Requirements working group sensibly recommended
four-digit year specification in RFC 1123:

      5.2.14  RFC-822 Date and Time Specification: RFC-822 Section 5

         The syntax for the date is hereby changed to:

            date = 1*2DIGIT month 2*4DIGIT

         All mail software SHOULD use 4-digit years in dates, to ease
         the transition to the next century.

|   It would probably be better to choose one of the following.
|
|       1991-06-20

This is probably the most readable choice.

|       1991-06-20T15:48:18Z

This seems needlessly cluttered.

|   It would be a serious mistake to allow any ISO 8601 date/time format
|   since writing a program to parse an arbitrary ISO date/time
|   representation would be a big challenge.  Instead adopt just one
|   possible representation.  (I would suggest the second of the two
|   formats presented above.)

I'm sure writing an ISO 8601 parser which returns the UNIX standard
time representation (seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000, or
whatever ;-) is a challenge, but it would be very, very useful.  Are
there anybody out there who would like to work with me on this?

</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum             Professional Programmer            +47-2-836-863
Naggum Software             Electronic Text             <erik@naggum.no>
0118 OSLO, NORWAY       Computer Communications        <enag@ifi.uio.no>