There's nothing wrong with leading with something like: ISO 8601 is a complex specification because of the many different ways to describe times, dates and dur

There's nothing wrong with leading with something like: ISO 8601 is a complex specification because of the many different ways to describe times, dates and duration. Don't let that complexity throw you off! The ISO 8601 timestamp format is clean and elegant. These examples will use the widely used ISO 8601 profile known as RFC 3339, which I'll refer to simply as "ISO 8601". No need for an illusion when synecdoche works.