5 ms·

The iso standard is pretty much spec'd out enough on Wikipedia.

• kevinpet 6y ago
  Is it? Are you sure? Are we following the ISO standard, or the Wikipedia standard?
  • chrismeller 6y ago
    Not to mention the fact that the Wikipedia article technically seems to violate the ISO copyright and could disappear at some point...
    • ThrustVectoring 6y ago
      Facts cannot be copyrighted. Phrasing the description of YYYY-MM-DD strings and the like in a different way is likely sufficient to be freely available. Now, whether that's actually enough to convince the administrators to keep it up and risk the time and expense of a lawsuit is another matter entirely - in practice, anything that rightsholders threaten to sue over is probably banned, regardless of the actual legal status.
      • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        > Facts cannot be copyrighted. Phrasing the description of YYYY-MM-DD strings and the like in a different way is likely sufficient to be freely available. To my knowledge, wholesale 'rephrasings' of standards documents have never been undertaken, even where royalty-free access to a document is in relatively high demand, such as with the C standard. StackOverflow ends up being the substitute for the standards document. As well as being a lot of work, it would open the door to small inaccuracies. A lot of work goes into 'laywering' the exact phrasing of such documents.
        • jfim 6y ago
          > To my knowledge, wholesale 'rephrasings' of standards documents have never been undertaken, even where royalty-free access to a document is in relatively high demand, such as with the C standard. No, they have. As a specific example, ETSI TS 102 221 contains enough of ISO/IEC 7816-2, 7816-3, and 7816-4 that one can implement a compatible device.
          • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
            Interesting, thanks. Do ETSI do this in the name of making the ISO standard freely accessible, or is it done for some other reason?
            • jfim 6y ago
              No, from what I understand it's done to standardize a lot of telecom stuff across Europe. I think they're somehow related to the GSM, but I haven't been in the telecom industry in well over a decade so my memory is fuzzy there.
  • alerighi 6y ago
    Probably we are following the Wikipedia standard, since most if not all the libraries that everyone uses to parse and produce ISO dates were written by people that read Wikipedia and not by people that bought the standard. The problem with "closed" standard is that most people if they have to pay for something they find other way, and assume the standard by reading other sources, Wikipedia, the implementation of some library that is supposed to implement the standard, or the drafts of the standard (like it's done with the C standard, do you assume that every developer of gcc have bought the standard?). A standard isn't a standard because someone wrote a paper and sold it, a standard is a standard if it's used by people. And it happens that since standards are not freely available people makes things that are close but not really conform to the standard, and these things because the de-facto standard. And you developer you have to support these cases. Let's say ISO8601, there are a ton of applications that produces dates that are similar to ISO8601 format but not quite like it. And that you must support because they are so common... and then you find piece of codes that tries to interpret a date in various ways trying to compensate for minor standard errors. It's a mess that could have been avoided if the standard document were really open.
• numpad0 6y ago
  No, the point of a standard is it’s supposed to be somehow comprehensive about something so a thing conformant to it can be expected to and guaranteed to work. The fact that partial documentation is enough to make something work isn’t enough to tell your customer to suck up the loss because it was beyond anyone’s responsibilities.
  • ak217 6y ago
    Yes, and the point of a standard is also that it should have an authoritative, immutable copy for a given version of the standard. The Wikipedia article is neither.
• diggernet 6y ago
  No, there are many bits of 8601:2019 that are not even mentioned on Wikipedia.