[whatwg] Parsing RFC3339 constructs

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch>, 2009-04-25 05:35 +0000:

> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:
> > 
> > Reading the spec, I have to wonder: Does HTML5 need to specify as much 
> > as it does inline? Can't more of it be referenced to ISO 8601 or even 
> > better; RFC 3339? I really fancy how Atom (RFC 4287) has defined date 
> > constructs: <http://www.atompub.org/rfc4287.html#date.constructs> Does 
> > not RFC 3339 defined date and time in a satisfactory manner to use 
> > directly in HTML5?
> 
> The problem isn't so much the syntax definitions as the parsing 
> definitions. We need very specific parsing rules; it's not clear that 
> there is anything to refer to that does the job we need here.

It seems pretty clear that there isn't anything else to refer to
for the date/time parsing rules -- but to me at least, specifying
those rules seems orthogonal to specifying the date/time syntax,
and I would think the syntax could just be defined by making
reference to the productions[1] in RFC 3339 (instead of completely
redefining them), while stating any exceptions.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339#section-5.6

I think the exceptions might just amount to:

  - the literal letters T and Z must be uppercase

  - a year must be four or more digits, and must be greater that zero

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/