[whatwg] Parsing RFC3339 constructs

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Mon Aug 10 16:47:59 PDT 2009


On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:59:11 +0200, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke at gmx.de> wrote:
> >> 
> >>   - the literal letters T and Z must be uppercase
> >
> > Any technical reason why they have to?
> 
> Any reason why they don't?

It simplifies processing a tiny amount.


> > It would help people understand what the difference to RFC 3339 is.
> 
> Indeed, and this is exactly what we did in RFC 4287, as I've pointed out 
> previously. And I can't say that date parsing has proven to be an issue 
> there at all, even with the little work we did on narrowing down and 
> tightening the syntax. Section 3.3. of RFC 4287 says:
> 
>    A Date construct is an element whose content MUST conform
>    to the "date-time" production in [RFC3339].  In addition,
>    an uppercase "T" character MUST be used to separate date
>    and time, and an uppercase "Z" character MUST be present
>    in the absence of a numeric time zone offset.
> 
> Perhaps HTML5 needs more detailing than this for parsing, but not 
> referencing RFC 3339 just for the sake of not referencing RFC 3339 
> doesn't make much sense imho.
> 
> For authoring (and parsing, infact), RFC 3339 plus a couple of 
> additional guidelines have proven to be enough for implementors of RFC 
> 4287, so assume HTML5 could be better off doing the same, no?

HTML5 now references ISO8601 directly in a non-normative note explaining 
why ISO8601 isn't referenced normatively.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


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