Hello,
I personally think that the ISO and W3 one are not looking particularily beautiful, with T (!) as a delimiter, but they are surely simple enough to parse...
Right! But at least it is a text based human readable format.
On the other we try to stay close to POSIX in many places, so sticking with ctime, or even seconds since epoch, would also be well justified...
The epoch format can be written down in text, all language that I know of supports this format and have formatting functions included. This would be a no brainer to use and let the different platform and system do the formatting. English, French or Japanese have all a different formats but they all come down to use epoch time.
Cheers, Andre.
Quoting [Mark.McKeown@manchester.ac.uk] (May 17 2006):
The W3C has a profile of ISO 8601 which simplifies life:
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
Also IETF have a RFC "Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps":
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3339.html
Other Relevent standards that specify dates are:
RFC 822 and RFC 1123
The HTTP protocol accepts dates in a number of formats, from section 3.3.1:
"HTTP applications have historically allowed three different formats for the representation of date/time stamps:
Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT ; RFC 822, updated by RFC 1123 Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT ; RFC 850, obsoleted by RFC 1036 Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994 ; ANSI C's asctime() format"
Hope this helps Mark
Quoting [Christopher Smith] (May 05 2006):
Does anybody have a pointer to the relevant ISO standard? Is there an ISO standard for that?
I found this link:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html
but I haven't read it in any detail.
-- Chris
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