Seth McGinnis said: "I hesitate to support encouraging the use of the T because in my experience, approximately 0% of existing NetCDF files have it."
a) We aren't advocating forbidding the older formats / saying that files with those time formats will become invalid. This is a question of what we should encourage. So the issue of what is in current files should be irrelevant. Tons of .nc files have "days since 1-1-1" (which is a horrid format). Just because a format is common is not a good reason to encourage its use. b) The CF community needs to respect (i.e., faithfully follow) other standards, just as we ask people to respect our standard. Some in the CF community might think that CF is a self-contained standard, but it isn't. We rely on IEEE-754 for binary number formats, various charsets for character encoding, the CRS Well Known Text Format, numerous calendar standards, numerous projections, etc. These are all external standards that we have included in CF simply by referencing them. We shouldn't slightly modify any of these standards when we use them in .nc files. Similarly we should cleanly adopt the ISO 8601:2004(E) standard format (with the T) for date times. [Okay, it weakens my argument that ISO 8601 says that the T may be omitted by mutual consent, but I think is is better for CF to recommend the format that is clearly recommended by ISO 8601:2004(E) (i.e., with the T).] -- Sincerely, Bob Simons IT Specialist Environmental Research Division NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center 99 Pacific St., Suite 255A (New!) Monterey, CA 93940 (New!) Phone: (831)333-9878 (New!) Fax: (831)648-8440 Email: [email protected] The contents of this message are mine personally and do not necessarily reflect any position of the Government or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <><
_______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
