Hi John, thank you! This is really useful advice for anyone working with ISO (or ISO/IEC JTC1) documents.
People might want to note down this link: <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cbor/GZ-Lv18x1AlL-CePa4m5FH26JGI> to get at this message later. Another extremely useful link to note down is: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ This is the quite sizable list of IT-related documents (ISO/IEC JTC1) that are available without payment. Of course, the main reference pages do not point to this, so from those you may get the impression that you have to pay for a document if you don’t check this list. (ISO 8601 is not on it, by the way, which is likely related to the fact that it is not a JTC1 standard, but published by ISO TC 154 — which is also the reason there is no “ISO/IEC” in the designation.) Other SDOs have other ways of handling their paywalled standards. IEEE, for instance, makes IEEE 802 standards openly available (account required) six months after publication: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/browse/standards/get-program/page/series?id=68 Other IEEE standards do not fall under this program, but are generally covered by the IEEE subscription any decent university library should have, making them openly available for all intents and purposes to academics. (This fact is, again, not that actively marketed.) Only standards under development are under a thicker veil. Often, Wikipedia is the best avenue at finding out more about “club standards” (standards behind a paywall). In this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 Really a good read, it exposes some details that one wouldn’t immediately catch from reading the document. It may also be full of misunderstandings, so relying on this information is theoretically not advisable — which doesn’t change the fact that Wikipedia information is usually way more normative in practice in an open-source software development environment than the club standards they describe (and that may even be true for openly available standards if they have been written in an opaque way). Grüße, Carsten _______________________________________________ TICTOC mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tictoc
