Re: [calsify] New Timestamp Draft

[Ujjwal Sharma <[e-mail]>]

Hey Elliot!

I answered a couple of these questions in a previous CalExt meeting, but
here goes another attempt at getting them out in writing:

On 22/01/2021 10.09 pm, Eliot Lear wrote:

> RFC 3339 or ISO 8601 is used all over the place.  It’s used in logging, email, and a great many other things.  Before the IETF goes monkeying with it, could the authors discuss what is driving this change?  What do you want people to do that they didn’t do before, and what do you want them to stop doing, and why?

There are many cases in which the information stored within a timestamp
is not enough and implementations need to include additional information
for various reasons. It is common knowledge that Java and Linux among
other implementations include an IANA timezone id suffixed to the
regular timestamp, but I think of it as an unfortunate situation that
this format is not standardized. The aim of this proposal is to:

1. Standardize the existing format.

2. Expand the format to include more information (in case of us, ECMA
TC39, this includes the calendar information which is the biggest reason
that drives us to expand the currently existing format).

3. Make the expansions generalizable enough to allow any additional
future information to be included.

4. Make certain parts of the RFC further future-proof, for example
remove the 2/3-year deprecated format and allow the expanded 6-year
format, which makes this RFC up to date with the newer versions of ISO8601.

> Also, I suggest that this work should go through DISPATCH.  There are a lot of other questions.  Here’s one: is the IETF really the right organization to do this work in? ISO wrote the underlying spec.  They presumably thought about it a lot.

We are already collaborating with the folks over at CalConnect, to
ensure that formats like ISO8601 end up adopting these additions as
well, but the IETF RFC would need to be updated as well, and it helps
ECMA TC39 refer to the RFC when using this format.

I hope these answers help clarify our positions. Feel free to ask me for
any further clarifications.

Thanks,
Ujjwal

-- 
Ujjwal "Ryzokuken" Sharma (he/him)

Compilers Hacker, Node.js Core Collaborator and Speaker