iso-8601

ISO 8601

The International Standards Organisation's standard, number 8601 is an international standard for date and time representations. It is used for all date-time representations in microformats.

Overview

For a plain-language overview of ISO 8601, we recommend the ISO 8601 summary by Markus Kuhn.

Microformats

Microformats using ISO8601 include:

• hAtom
• hCalendar
• hCard
• hReview
• ...

RFC 3339

RFC 3339 defines a profile of ISO 8601 for the use in Internet protocols and standards.

• It explicitly excludes durations and dates before the common era.
• The more complex formats like week numbers and ordinal day are not permitted (see RFC 3339, section 5.6).

Microformats SHOULD use RFC 3339.

Issues

• How should dates before the common era be marked up? Andy Mabbett
• If a web page is created or edited by a non-technical human, it is unfriendly to expect them to work in ISO date format. Charles Belov

See also

• ISO 8601 on Wikipedia
• ISO 8601:2004(E) from ISO (zip-pdf, 228KB)
• Summary of 8601 by ISO
• Technical Committee ISO/TC 154, Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration.
• The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar
• Current date in week date and ordinal date format
• ISO 8601 at the Open Directory Project
• W3C Specification about UTC Date and Time and IETF Internet standard RFC 3339, based on ISO 8601

Related pages

• datetime-design-pattern
• date-design-pattern
• abbr-design-pattern