[microformats-discuss] International date formats

[fantasai]

Tantek Çelik wrote:
> 
>>I presume the official designation would be an "ISO_8601" date in the
>>title, but the 'recommended' practice would be, with a space and
>>timezone:
>>
>>><abbr title="YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM[:SS]+-Z">
> 
> I would prefer to point to the W3C Note on Date Time for recommended
> practice for now.
>  
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
> 
> Which does ask for the "T" date time separator to be used.

That note's targetted at more computer-oriented uses than a specifically
human-targetted tooltip. The 'T' is helpful in software and data formats
because it makes the date-time parse as a single token. However, a 'title'
attribute's value ought to be primarily helpful to humans. I don't consider
date-times with a T to be human-friendly: they are harder for people to
recognize as a date and time rather than an arbitrary numerical string
because the separation into a date string and a time string (both of which,
unlike timestamps, are common outside computer formats) is more visually
distinct. Using a space still conforms to ISO 8601, so it's not reinventing
anything, just using an option that happens not to be part of the subset
described in the W3C Note.

~fantasai