Hi Ulrich, > My final essence would be: While in IT it's preferable to reference instead of > copying, there is a problem if the referenced objects vanish.
I think we established that the older revisions of ISO 8601 that are relevant here are in no danger of vanishing. > So in some cases copying may be preferable. > Eventually I wonder how much legal it is to extract the essence of an ISO > standard to a Wikipedia article or part of an RFC (e.g. instead of writing "as > defined in ISO XXX", writing "using ... according to ISO XXX"). I see such > copying would harm the ISO business model, however. RFC 3339 essentially is a copy of that part of ISO 8601 that it intends to cover as a profile, rephrased in terms an engineer would understand. You do *not* need to have a copy of ISO 8601 to implement RFC 3339. That said, when ISO 8601 was re-issued in 2000, the description of time zone designators subtly changed, and apparently nobody caught this. All rephrasing cannot help with information that is behind a trapdoor. (That is one of the observations behind recognizing the restatement antipattern, which doesn’t invalidate the approach of RFC 3339 in the specific circumstances here.) The interoperability problem is between implementers of RFC 3339 and implementers that also try to independently abide by ISO 8601. Obviously, we are better off if the standard we are referencing uses unambiguous methods such as formal description techniques, but ISO 8601 is (was) what it is (was). So, back to the actual question at hand: My summary of the discussion so far is that I don’t think we have uncovered new information that would invalidate the approach of SEDATE to update RFC 3339 in this specific aspect. Grüße, Carsten _______________________________________________ TICTOC mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tictoc
