iso-8601
Revision as of 15:15, 24 February 2013 by TomMorris (talk | contribs) (→ISO 8601 implementations in programming libraries: Ruby, but no ordinal dates)
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, as well as a number of other formats (XML, XML Schema Datatypes, RDF, Atom).
Overview
For a plain-language overview of ISO 8601, we recommend the ISO 8601 summary by Markus Kuhn.
Microformats
Microformats using ISO8601 include:
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 re-use RFC 3339, but MUST NOT be limited to it, in order to include both more human readable, yet still easily unambiguously parsable, alternatives, as well as ISO 8601 features deemed to be useful.
ISO 8601 implementations in programming libraries
- JodaTime - the Java date-time library - ISO8601 Java calendar system
- Perl: DateTime::Format::ISO8601
- Ruby 1.9 implements an iso8601 method in the Date STDLIB but it does not handle ordinal dates.
to do! document different implementations.
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
- StackOverflow: iso-8601 tag - questions about iso-8601 as related to JavaScript, PHP, MySQL and other programming languages and technologies.