Stu Weibel has given me permission to quote from his private mail:
Where you have YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm-hh:mm, is it possible to interpose a seperator other than T that makes it clearer to the human eye where the date ends and Time begins? I suspect the answer to this is that such a separator would knock the profile out of whack with 8601, but I thought I'd ask anyhow.
The "T" is, I think, the most despised aspect of the ISO 8601 standard but I think we're stuck with it. Some relevant quotes from the standard: [T] is used as a time designator to indicate the start of the representation of the time of day in combined date and time of day expressions; The space character shall not be used in the representations. The only suggestion I have seen for getting rid of the "T" is a kind of trick: We say that we are representing not a "combined date and time" but rather a separate date and a time. We then place them next to each other, separated by our favourite character. If "*" represents our favourite character, we get: 1994-11-05*08:15:30-05:00 instead of: 1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 The problem with this solution is precisely that it is a trick. In reality, we are dealing with a single date-with-time and it confuses things to pretend that we're not. Also, there must be lots of software out there which is ISO 8601-conformant and would choke on our favourite character. I suggest we decide that this stuff isn't primarily for human consumption and make use of it, warts and all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Misha Wolf Email: misha.wolf@reuters.com 85 Fleet Street Standards Manager Voice: +44 171 542 6722 London EC4P 4AJ Reuters Limited Fax : +44 171 542 8314 UK ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Reuters Ltd.