Last Friday Sun made the source code for Star Office available from http://www.openoffice.org. What has this got to do with the timezone list you might ask. Well, one of the projects is to produce an XML based file format for use by Open Office (http://xml.openoffice.org). The Related Documentation section of the draft spec (http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_spec_draft.pdf) gives a URL for ISO 8601: http://www.iso.ch/markete/8601.pdf. Sure enough, the PDF file is there, available for anyone to download for free. (I hadn't seen this mentioned here before, but a quick check of Markus Kuhn's date and time page at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html shows that he has a link to this PDF file so he has obviously already spotted this.) Peter Ilieve peter@aldie.co.uk
Peter Ilieve wrote on 2000-10-16 08:43 UTC:
ISO 8601: http://www.iso.ch/markete/8601.pdf.
Sure enough, the PDF file is there, available for anyone to download for free.
(I hadn't seen this mentioned here before, but a quick check of Markus Kuhn's date and time page at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html shows that he has a link to this PDF file so he has obviously already spotted this.)
It actually had been there for over a year and I thought, we had it reasonably widely announced on the usual standards newsgroups (comp.std.internat, etc.). Funnily, in November 1999, I received an email from Mr. Jacques-Olivier Chabot, who I think was then the CEO/president/etc. of ISO Central Secretariat in Geneva, telling me "Your web site is certainly very interesting but your placement of ISO 8601:1988, and of its draft, constitutes an infringement to the ISO copyright. I am therefore requesting that these two ISO documents be immediately taken off your site and that you confirm to me in writing that this has been done." I replied with a polite explanation of how the web works, what a URL is, how users of MS Internet Explorer can determine, on which server a downloaded document originated, that during the download of ISO 8601 via my web page onto Mr. Chabot's PC, the bits actually never left the building of ISO, and why I believe that the URL of ISO's own online copy hardly contains more intellectual property than ISO's postal address, whose presence on my web page was not attacked, even though it was also copied from ISO's web server and is several hundred bytes times longer than the URL. I was slightly more concerned about the URL to Louis Visser's draft of the second edition of ISO 8601 (and I did make the URL a bit less visible), but I also believe that ISO CS has no copyright claims on a draft that ISO CS did not author. In addition, it has since then become common practice in many working groups to put ISO drafts on the web. I also attached a list of the (occasionally ridicolous) mistakes in the 2nd ed. ISO 8601 draft that the public review via my web page uncovered, in order to emphasise what a crucial quality assurance a public review can be for a standards document and that I wonder, how a ISO 9001 certified organization can possibly lack that as a required procedure in their quality manual. Well, I never heard from them again ... I actually suggested to ISO when I visited them in 1995 in Geneva to put ISO 8601 as an example document onto their web server, and I was delighted to see that after 4 years of hard scanning work they have actually managed to implement that suggestion. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Markus Kuhn wrote:
It actually had been there for over a year and I thought, we had it reasonably widely announced on the usual standards newsgroups (comp.std.internat, etc.).
ISTR at one point finding ISO had a public web page extolling the virtues of ISO 8601 as a solution to the Y2K problem - and linking to their PDF. I presumed they simply hadn't removed the PDF when later that web page disappeared. -- Joseph S. Myers jsm28@cam.ac.uk
participants (3)
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Joseph S. Myers -
Markus Kuhn -
Peter Ilieve