I fully support John Caron's proposal of having ISO 8601 datetime strings as another way for encoding time data. But I proposed a standard name so would like to return to that.
>From a few replies so far it seems that many interpret this standard name proposal as a fundamental change of the convention. I don't see it that way. My intention was to enhance the interoperability for such data by specifying a limited subset of ISO8601 datetime string formats. Note that having such variables does not break the convention as long as they are not coordinate variables. Can I have the final decision, please? -Aleksandar On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:39 PM, John Caron <ca...@unidata.ucar.edu> wrote: > Hi All: > > Ok, its friday afternoon so ill bite on this, and wax philosophical even > before the beer. > > An insidious mistake is to think that problems should be fixed in software > libraries. Actually the deep mistake is to mistake the reference software > with the file encoding. Why bother fixing the encoding when a few lines in > _your_ software can fix the problem transparently? Ive seen this occur in > all three of the great western religious systems of our day: netCDF, HDF and > OPeNDAP libraries. > > Better is to do the encoding of information as cleanly as possible. > Post-apocalyptic software engineers who have lost all knowledge of what > netCDF and CF mean and are painstakingly uncovering climate archives with > their whisk brooms will thank us. > > "35246 hours since 1970-01-01" isnt just unreadable; it uses a calendar > system that may be non-trivial. Calendars are hard; Java has got it wrong > already twice, and is now trying for a 3rd time (with jsr 310 in Java 8, > based on experience with joda-time). > > "1974-01-08T14:00:00Z" ( == "35246 hours since 1970-01-01" in the standard > calendar) is a better representation of that date. because at least you know > what the user thought the damn date was. > > The good argument for "35246 hours since 1970-01-01" representation, is that > given two of them, at least you know what the user thought the damn time > interval is between them. > > Anyway, I think both are good, and should be allowed. Finish your beer and > ill order another round. > > John _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata