On 20. Oct 2022, at 08:42, Ulrich Windl <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On the other hand, 3339 contains references to ISO 8601:1988 >> and, for that matter, ISO 8601:2000 and at least the former is >> rather close to normative. So, give the availability (or last > > You won't like this type of comment, but isn't a reference to a standard, > that is not available anymore, equivalent to referring to no standard? > I did not inspect ISO standards, but for any evolving standard I'd expect > that the previous versions should be derivable from the current one; > otherwise it's just nonsense.
I’m not sure I understand what exactly you are expecting here, but we should not discuss this in generalities, but for the specific standard that we want to maintain. Revisions of ISO 8601 are published documents, and at least for people with a library behind them it is easy to get copies. This is not very inclusive, but references to ISO 8601 are definitely not a reference to “no standard”. RFC 3339 was published in 2002, so it couldn’t reference the 2004 or 2019 revisions of ISO 8601. Whether these revisions are “better” references than the 2000 or 1988 revisions depends a lot on what the market has done with the changes in those documents. To me it seems the 2000 version is still quite current in the domain that RFC 3339 attempts to cover. However, these standards are simply not very good as reference material for the specific profile that RFC 3339 is, so RFC 3339 restates them in a way that is more useful for us (e.g., employing a formal description technique, ABNF). So, yes, this is a situation that could be considered to fall under the restatement antipattern, but the purpose of RFC 3339, to make ISO 8601 more useful in the Internet, has overwhelmingly been achieved, and I surmise this is to a large part *because* of the restatements. No, we cannot rely on any assumption that a revision of a standard we have been using by the SDO publishing has any specific characteristics, such as being sensible engineering or being picked up by the market. Completely ignoring revisions, of course, is not very smart either. But I haven’t heard anyone suggest that RFC 3339 could benefit from a revision incorporating new material from newer revisions of ISO 8601. (Of course, I’d be very interested if that is actually the case.) Grüße, Carsten _______________________________________________ TICTOC mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tictoc
