Re: [Sedate] Recharter

[Justin Grant <[e-mail]>]

Hi Bron - Your text is very clear, and matches my understanding exactly.

I wonder if we should borrow some of this super-clear text for the SEDATE
RFC text. What do you (and Carsten and Ujjwal and others) think?

I have an outstanding PR (
https://github.com/ietf-wg-sedate/draft-ietf-sedate-datetime-extended/pull/35)
that we could fold changes into.

Thanks,
Justin


On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 5:29 PM Bron Gondwana <brong=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> We've been discussing a changed charter for a bit, with the "update to
> RFC3339" as called out in our existing charter having been detected as
> needed.  My apology for the delay in the work on this, the chairs have been
> workshopping it with Francesca, our AD.
>
> Here's the proposed new charter text.  Please let us know pretty quickly
> if you have any suggestions for changes to this - Francesca will be
> proposing it shortly.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bron and Mark, your SEDATE chairs.
>
> Recharter March 2023
>
> RFC 3339 defines a text format as a profile of ISO 8601 that can reliably
> express an instant in time, either in UTC or in a local time along with the
> offset against UTC. However, datetime data often has additional context,
> such as the timezone or calendar system that was in use when that instant
> was recorded.
>
> Particularly when using times for interval, recurrence, or offset
> calculations, it is necessary to know the context in which the timepoint
> exists. It would be valuable to have a standard text serialisation format
> for this contextual data. This working group will develop and publish a
> format meeting that requirement, subject to the additional constraints
> described below.
>
>    -
>
>    This format must be able to round-trip through intermediate systems
>    which do not understand the full context.
>    -
>
>    Systems which don’t understand all the contextual fields must still be
>    able to reliably extract the instant in time.
>
>
> This format will be a companion to RFC 3339 rather than a replacement,
> embedding unaltered RFC 3339 data in a way that makes it easy to parse just
> the datetime data independently of the context.
>
> The work on this format discovered an issue with RFC3339. When ISO8601 was
> revised in 2000, the “-00:00” offset which RFC3339 had invented for “offset
> isn’t relevant” was made invalid. This means that RFC3339 is not a strict
> subset of the current version of ISO8601.
>
>
> To fix this issue, the working group will additionally update RFC3339 by
> removing the definition of “-00:00” and updating the definition of “Z”
> (Zulu) to mean that the offset to local time is not known, leaving “+00:00”
> to mean that UTC is the preferred reference point for local time.
>
> Any other changes to RFC 3339 are explicitly outside the charter for this
> working group. If a need for any other changes to RFC3339 emerge, this
> group must recharter before performing that work. In this case, the changes
> to RFC 3339 will need to be clearly motivated, evaluated and precisely
> scoped during the rechartering process, and will need to make only changes
> that keep the timestamp specification a profile of current versions of ISO
> 8601. Stability of the RFC 3339 timestamp format is important to existing
> IETF protocols and the Internet generally, and any rechartering process
> should frown on anything that would invalidate the existing timestamp
> format.
>
> The working group will coordinate with ECMA International TC39 and ISO/TC
> 154 to ensure that this work remains a strict extension of ISO 8601 and its
> various parts rather than becoming a conflicting standard.
>
> Milestones:
>
>    - Apr 2023 Submit extended date and time draft to the IESG for
>    publication
>
>
> --
>   Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
>   [e-mail]
>
>
> --
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>