REQ: ISO 8601 Comments

Don Park (donpark@quake.net)
Wed, 12 Aug 1998 11:27:34 -0700

Those of us working on the XLF (Extensible Log Format) are faced with the
issue of deciding on the timestamp format. I thought it would be prudent to
seek comments on the subject in general and specifically on use of the ISO
8601 standard from the XML-DEV members.

The choices we are considering are:

1. Single timestamp attribute using ISO 8601
2. Single timestamp attribute using custom format designed for searching,
sorting, and parsing efficiency.
3. Timestamp info broken up into multiple attributes (year, month, date,
hour, minute, second, milliseconds, nanoseconds.
4. Timestamp info broken up into two or three attributes (year/month/date,
hour/minute/second, etc.) with the possibility of using ISO 8601.

A related side issue is whether to require global time or allow local time
as well.

It is interesting to note that the recently released DCD spec uses ISO 8601
subset (whatever that means).

Don Park