[Sedate] Proposed recharter

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

Hi All,

Here's some proposed text.  Feel free to edit directly at:

https://notes.ietf.org/bZEMq1JgTtiO6F0XWLD4MA?both

*Charter**
*

RFC3339 defines a 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.

The work for draft-ietf-sedate-datetime-extended 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.

Further, in real world usage, the "Z" (Zulu) offset is often taken to mean "offset isn't relevant", and only "+00:00" to mean an explicit offset.

This is not an issue with ISO8601 which makes no claims about the meaning of the offset, it's only an issue with how the IETF has chosen to interpret different representations of the zero offset.

This working group is narrowly chartered to update RFC3339 in a fully backwards compatible way, to say that "-00:00" MUST NOT be generated but SHOULD be accepted, and allow for the meaning of "Z" to match real world usage.

Other changes to RFC3339 are explicitly outside the charter for this working group. Stability of the RFC3339 timestamp format is important to existing IETF protocols and the Internet generally.

The working group will coordinate with ECMA International TC39 and ISO/TC154 **to ensure that this work remains a strict extension of ISO 8601 and its various parts rather than becoming a conflicting standard.**

Milestones:

  Feb 2023 - issue a document that updates RFC3339 to disallow new timestamps with "-00:00" offsets.

--
  Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
  [e-mail]