Hi
A long, long time ago, in 1997, W3C looked at the monument ISO 8601 was,
and produced a simplified profile for mere mortals:
https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
It serves as formatting basis in XML, IJSON, etc
Sometime later, in 2002, the IETF took this note, fleshed it out a
little, and produced RFC 3339
And then coreutils date took it all and grew the --iso-8601 and
--rfc-3339
Unfortunately, coreutils managed to make both of those incompatible with
the W3C iso-8601 profile lots of software languages use:
1. The W3C profile mandates T as time separator, and ":" as hour/minutes
separator
2. RFC 3339 makes both optional
Then, logically, date removed the ":" for its --iso-8601 option,
$ date --iso-8601=seconds
2019-03-28T18:09:47+0100
and then removed T from its --rfc-3339 option
$ date --rfc-3339=seconds
2019-03-28 18:10:11+01:00
Graaa
Would it be possible to make them both optional in --rfc-3339, and both
mandatory in --iso-8601 ? Or add a --w3c option that conforms to the W3C
profile? This is all so sad… Some languages like Go do no understand
neither of date's output, because they follow the W3C profile.
Regards,
--
Nicolas Mailhot
