4 ms·

ISO 8601 recurring intervals are very nice and well thought out. Sadly, they are a corner of the standard that almost no one supports completely.

• jolmg 6y ago
  What's their use? I can't figure it out. At first, I thought it was going to be something that would allow one to express, e.g. I start work from this date, from this hour to this hour, these days of the week. But the format seems to only express contiguous intervals. What's the point of recurring intervals if they're limited to be contiguous? You could just join them into one interval. EDIT: Or am I wrongly assuming that they're contiguous and rather they just don't specify when they repeat?
  • randallsquared 6y ago
    It's probably more useful to think of recurring intervals as specifying an instant plus a period until the recurring instant. Cron jobs, for example, use such a concept. If you want to specify how long some event starting at that instant should be, you can use a separate non-recurring interval to show that. In this frame, "how often should we start the budget meeting" and "how long should the budget meeting be" are separate questions and not discoverable with a single answer.
    • jolmg 6y ago
      It seems obvious now that you've clarified it. :P Thanks. Though the name is a bit misleading. Maybe it should be called "recurring instants" instead. I can now agree that it seems to be nicely thought out, flexible without being overly complicated. However, just like how the duration of the event can be a separate question, so too can the duration between instants and the number of repeats. I think this would be the main reason why it's not widely adopted. There just doesn't seem to be much of a need for a standard representation of durations or recurring intervals/instants.
• gorgoiler 6y ago
  I have seen them show up in iCal / .ics calendars.