Re: [dispatch] [Sedate] WG Review: Serialising Extended Data About Times and Events (sedate)

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2021-06-03, at 21:35, [e-mail] wrote:
> 
> That said, I'm very concerned by the fact that the revised ISO 8601
> specifications are not freely available, and the cost to obtain them is nothing
> short of outrageous: 336 CHF ($371 at today's exchange rate). These are also
> hugely complex highly technical specifications, IMO incapable of being
> summarized in any useful way. This means that anyone wishing to participate in
> significant technical discussion involving them is going to need to purchase
> copies. This represents a very significant burden to anyone wishing to
> participate in the discussion without a corporate sponser willing to bear the
> cost.

To be blunt, I’d suggest we (almost) entirely ignore ISO 8601:2019.

My spies tell me ISO 8601-2:2019 was created as a container for a number of the ideas that aren’t so relevant for text-based date-times (uncertainties? Spring Northern Hemisphere?  Quadrimesters?).
ISO 8601-1:2019 seems to have 6-digit years (±NNNNNN, so it’s +002021-06-03T22:44:37.095927Z here right now), which we should adopt (but certainly not century or decade references and lots of other innovations that are great for library managers but not so much on the Internet).

I think there should be a really high burden of proof for anyone wanting to bring anything else that hasn’t been part of the version of ISO 8601 that was used at the time RFC 3339 was published.
(This should be in the charter, and the details can then be discussed in the WG.)

The Temporal proposal in TC39, however, is highly relevant.
However, it seems it is at stage 2...

Grüße, Carsten