Nicolas Mailhot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The XML folks have defined a single common international date/time > format
I just looked at <http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime> and it appears that (1) There are 9 formats, not 1. (2) There is no way to represent a leap second. This is not normally a problem, since few coreutils hosts handle leap seconds correctly, but for those hosts that do I suppose we can just ignore the XML standard. (3) There is no way to represent time zone offsets that are not a multiple of a minute, or years before 0000 or after 9999, or a few other things like that. But I suppose they are just inheriting these limitations from ISO 8601. I suppose we can add an option for this, with an operand to specify which of the 9 formats you want. Something like the existing "date --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC". But I'm a bit leery of calling it "date --xml=TIMESPEC", or "date --w3c=TIMESPEC". These guys might change their mind some day in the future. Is there some more-specific name we can use, that XML folks would recognize? Also, I see a slightly different set of rules in <http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/> (2004-10-28), section 3.2.7. For example, it says that a canonical representation cannot use the time zone "+00:00", and that fractional seconds cannot end in "0", and that the time zone is optional. What gives? This document looks far more official: does it supersede the document you mentioned? Should "date" output a canonical representation? I guess that might mean that there are 10 XML formats instead of 9? Or even more, if non-canonical formats are desired? Sorry, I'm a bit lost here. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
