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There are some non-trivial changes between the draft standards and the final ISO 8601:2019-1 standard, one of which relates to making the use of T stricter, and

There are some non-trivial changes between the draft standards and the final ISO 8601:2019-1 standard, one of which relates to making the use of T stricter, and the mentioned provision was removed. Regardless, ISO 8601 has generally discouraged using spaces within expressions. From ISO 8601:2004, section 3.4.1: > Unless explicitly allowed by this International Standard the character "space" shall not be used in the representations. Similarly, from ISO 8601:2019-1, section 3.2.1: > The character "space" shall not be used in the expressions. However, through looser interpretation of the standard, "2021-10-24 11:02:03Z" could be allowed if treated as a date representation followed by a space followed by a time representation (note that the formal time representation in ISO 8601:2019-1 is T11:02:03Z, but it allows omission of T for extended format as per 5.3.5).

letmeinhere 5y ago
ISO business model is so strange; in order to make money they have to hide the actual standard from the vast majority of engineers that it relates to, so we just assume whatever was proposed was close enough.
- ademarre 5y ago
  There are very many things I never would have discovered and learned if IETF RFCs were not free. The most useful knowledge I've acquired about building things on the internet came from there. Industries that are more reliant on ISO or other non-free standards are surely worse off because of it.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Yes, on practice the draft becomes the actual standard. That is, unless it's in a regulated industry that is required by law to follow the actual standard. Then it disobeys the law most of the time, and "disobey" the market the rest of the time and everything breaks. Also, it leaves the people with a secret law that nobody can know the consequences. The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    Yup, I wonder if an issuing group pays a fee on new versions as well as a maintenance fee would work out.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster. ISO was founded in 1947, and back then very many of its standards were about physical objects – pipe threads, screws, bearings, belts, film, steel, plastic, rubber, textiles, etc – and even today they still have many standards on those kinds of topics. Imagine you are an aerospace engineer in the 1970s, and you need a copy of the new standard ISO 46:1973 (Aircraft — Fuel nozzle grounding plugs and sockets) – if nobody at your work has a copy, you just order it and pay for it with the company's money (expense it, get your boss to sign the purchase order, whatever). Nobody would have a problem with that and you wouldn't think there was anything inappropriate about it either, it would just seem totally normal to anybody in the 1970s. The problem is that technology and culture have changed and ISO hasn't kept up – especially for software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught, in which multi-billion dollar companies will charge millions for software packages and then include in their code some open source library that someone maintains as an unpaid hobby, in which many employers baulk at paying for things which in prior decades employers would have just paid for without question. The culture has changed from one in which people are used to paying money for physical books in person or via mail order, to one in which they expect to get information from the Internet instantaneously and for free. And it is probably mostly in software that people complain about this. I could be wrong, but I would guess that for aerospace engineers it is no more an issue today than in the 1970s. Even if ISO were to charge a few hundred dollars for a standards document, it would still be a lot cheaper than most things aerospace engineers deal with, and your employer will pay for it, who cares. At big firms such as Airbus or Boeing, they probably have some kind of subscription so their engineers just get access to all new ISO standards automatically.
    - ademarre 5y ago
      > software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught Consider also the pace of innovation in software and networking—the internet at large. I think it's both a consequence and a cause of the change in culture you described.
concordDance 5y ago
> There are some non-trivial changes between the draft standards and the final ISO 8601:2019-1 standard, one of which relates to making the use of T stricter, and the mentioned provision was removed Yes, and? The draft standard is the pretty much everyone actually uses. For most purposes it's the "real" one.
- mlyle 5y ago
  Robustness principle. There's no way you should be relying upon a draft to emit things that violate the real standard.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    there is never any final difference...since you work in a group, and every change is vetted, it only gets ratified when everyone says 'yep, no more changes'
euroderf 5y ago
Couldn't they permit "_" in place of "T" ? It's not a space, and it certainly makes a date_time string quicker to parse at a glance.

letmeinhere 5y ago

ISO business model is so strange; in order to make money they have to hide the actual standard from the vast majority of engineers that it relates to, so we just assume whatever was proposed was close enough.

ademarre 5y ago
There are very many things I never would have discovered and learned if IETF RFCs were not free. The most useful knowledge I've acquired about building things on the internet came from there. Industries that are more reliant on ISO or other non-free standards are surely worse off because of it.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Yes, on practice the draft becomes the actual standard. That is, unless it's in a regulated industry that is required by law to follow the actual standard. Then it disobeys the law most of the time, and "disobey" the market the rest of the time and everything breaks. Also, it leaves the people with a secret law that nobody can know the consequences. The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  Yup, I wonder if an issuing group pays a fee on new versions as well as a maintenance fee would work out.
- skissane 5y ago
  > The ISO governance should be changed ASAP. It was never good, and nowadays it's a disaster. ISO was founded in 1947, and back then very many of its standards were about physical objects – pipe threads, screws, bearings, belts, film, steel, plastic, rubber, textiles, etc – and even today they still have many standards on those kinds of topics. Imagine you are an aerospace engineer in the 1970s, and you need a copy of the new standard ISO 46:1973 (Aircraft — Fuel nozzle grounding plugs and sockets) – if nobody at your work has a copy, you just order it and pay for it with the company's money (expense it, get your boss to sign the purchase order, whatever). Nobody would have a problem with that and you wouldn't think there was anything inappropriate about it either, it would just seem totally normal to anybody in the 1970s. The problem is that technology and culture have changed and ISO hasn't kept up – especially for software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught, in which multi-billion dollar companies will charge millions for software packages and then include in their code some open source library that someone maintains as an unpaid hobby, in which many employers baulk at paying for things which in prior decades employers would have just paid for without question. The culture has changed from one in which people are used to paying money for physical books in person or via mail order, to one in which they expect to get information from the Internet instantaneously and for free. And it is probably mostly in software that people complain about this. I could be wrong, but I would guess that for aerospace engineers it is no more an issue today than in the 1970s. Even if ISO were to charge a few hundred dollars for a standards document, it would still be a lot cheaper than most things aerospace engineers deal with, and your employer will pay for it, who cares. At big firms such as Airbus or Boeing, they probably have some kind of subscription so their engineers just get access to all new ISO standards automatically.
  - ademarre 5y ago
    > software-related standards. We are an industry in which there are lots of independent contractors and self-employed people and small businesses, it is easy to be self-taught Consider also the pace of innovation in software and networking—the internet at large. I think it's both a consequence and a cause of the change in culture you described.

concordDance 5y ago

> There are some non-trivial changes between the draft standards and the final ISO 8601:2019-1 standard, one of which relates to making the use of T stricter, and the mentioned provision was removed Yes, and? The draft standard is the pretty much everyone actually uses. For most purposes it's the "real" one.

mlyle 5y ago
Robustness principle. There's no way you should be relying upon a draft to emit things that violate the real standard.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- convolvatron 5y ago
  there is never any final difference...since you work in a group, and every change is vetted, it only gets ratified when everyone says 'yep, no more changes'

euroderf 5y ago

Couldn't they permit "_" in place of "T" ? It's not a space, and it certainly makes a date_time string quicker to parse at a glance.