Re: AW: ISO 8601 anyone?? And more on Parties.

[g1smd@freeuk.com (Ian Galpin)]

On 2001-Apr-17 Andreas Schultz <Schultz.DKV@t-online.de> wrote in <ebXML-core>:


> I also agree with what Sharon said about the CONTENT. But - the possibility
> we have within EDIFACT allows people to write Date - information in a format
> they are used to. Limiting this to just one format, even if it may (or may
> not as Eduardo points out) be stated by W3C (who as we at least since
> Washington all know does not have the same status as UN/CEFACT EWG or ISO)
> seems to be a poor solution. I would not expect the Europeans (mostly using
> DDMMYYYY)to change the format they are used to, especially not while
> exchangig data within Europe.


Under CEN regulations, all European and Scandinavian countries have now
adopted the EN 28601 standard, which has the same words as ISO 8601. It
should not be a problem to use Year-Month-Day across the whole of Europe.
Lets get rid of the dd/mm/yy - mm/dd/yy ambiguity for ever. Although W3C
does not have the status of ISO, many W3C recommendations incorporate the
ideas from common ISO standards.. ISO 8601, ISO 3166, ISO 4217, ISO 8859,
ISO 10646 and so on. In Germany, DIN (the German standards authority)
revised the DIN 5008 standard in 1996 to outlaw the old '20 VIII 97' date
format in favour of '1997-08-20'  a la ISO 8601 & EN 28601 standards. DIN
5008 is the standard for typographical date formats, used in letters,
contracts, invoices, publications, and so on, in Germany. It has no ISO or
EN equivalent (yet!).



> So, I guess the solution only can be to give
> informations about the format a date is expressed in (even if this
> is not compliant to W3C or ISO 8601 but at "least" with UN/EDIFACT).

Let's use just one format, end-to-end, in the whole process.
Avoids confusion, needs less processing.



 Cheers,


 Ian A.N. Galpin.

         *Sadly my middle two initials don't repeat, but
         *my first three initials do spell my first name ;->


<g1smd@freeuk.com>


[2001-04-18]

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