----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "ISO 8601" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, 2000 - 01 - 14 01:23 Subject: [ISO8601] XML does not mention ISO 8601. [2001-Jan-14] A few days ago, while in Bournemouth, Dorset, UK, I visited the local 'Borders' bookshop, which is absolutely huge. They must have millions of books in stock. There must be many thousands in just the computer section alone. I had a look at very many computer books to see if any of them contained any reference to the ISO 8601 standard at all. I was extremely disappointed. Internet Standards and Protocols. Dilip Naik. Microsoft Press: No mention of ISO 8601 anywhere within the book. A huge omission. Most (just about all, in fact) other 'general' computer books also made no mention of it. A few made mention of ISO, the organisation, but most wrongly called it 'The International Standards Organisation', when the correct title is the 'International Organisation for Standardisation'. Another case of the author just guessing, rather than actually looking at the ISO Web Site which is easily found at: <http://www.iso.ch/>. Professional WAP, was a book that mentioned the Year-Month-Day date format on Page 95, but then failed to use it in any of the examples shown on Pages 183 to 187, where it could have been used to very good effect. Another missed opportunity. I had a look in the index at the back of many of the books. Many of them did mention some selected ISO standards. However this was usually ISO 646, ISO 8859, or ISO 10646, and perhaps a few others. The ISO 8601 standard was not mentioned in the index of any of the books that I looked at; not a single one. It is interesting to note that the vast majority of the Internet related books also failed to mention standards such as ISO 3166 which is the one that defines the two-letter country codes that ultimately make email and Web Site addresses work. There were several dozen books under the heading of XML. Almost every one of these had no mention of ISO 8601 within. Many of them contained no information about date formatting under XML. This is really bad. Several books gave some programming examples, but using date formats other than ISO 8601, usually using only the American 'mm/dd/yy' date format (but, then again, a couple of years back, several books that were supposed to help people with their Year 2000 Problem had all their example program codes using only two digit years, and of course they still failed at (20)00-01-01 !!!). One book gave some date examples (like '07/01/00'), and then warned the user that it may be possible to misread this date, because in the US 'mm/dd/yy' is used, and in Europe it is 'dd/mm/yy'. No mention was made of the Year-Month-Day date format, the ISO 8601 standard itself, nor were any of the date examples in the correct format. What a major chance to write some useful paragraphs in that book? A totally wasted opportunity. Building Web Sites with XML. Michael Floyd. This mentions ISO 8601 on Page 78 and then immediately spoils it by quoting this example... 1999-6-29T08:06:22+4:0 - spot the three mistakes (all of the same type). Almost, but not quite. Oh dear. XML - The Annotated Specification. Bob DuCharme. Does not mention ISO 8601, or Date and Time at all. About the same level as all the other books on XML that I looked at; way over 50 I guess. Bad. Only about three books correctly gave a date example using the ISO 8601 format, but they then failed to actually mention the ISO 8601 standard itself, failed to mention why the date needs to be written that way, and then also failed to mention what the example date actually means (Year-Month-Day-Hour-Minute-Second). They just printed the date in the format of '1999-07-22T15:08:22' within a programming example, without any further explanation as to why it is done this way, or what it means. Several books made reference to the GMT Time Zone, rather than to UTC which has been used since 1971 (GMT and UTC are NOT the same thing... they are close, to within 0.9 seconds, but they are emphatically not identical). Most books didn't mention Time Zones at all. One said that GMT and UTC were absolutely identical. Absolutely not! Ask any astronomer, or look at the various Astronomy and Time FAQs available on the Internet. XML Developers Handbook. Kurt Cagle. Sybex. This was the only book that I saw do it completely right. This was out of at least 50 books that I looked in. Even so, there was a lot more, that we all know as obvious, that could have been said, but wasn't. With XML as a new technology, and the ISO 8601 date format supposedly now a part of the specification, it was horrifying to discover that over 95% of books on the subject contained either none, or incorrect, information on the subject. The people writing these books are trumpeted, often on the inside front or back cover, as 'experts on the subject having been at XYZ Corporation for over 25 years, and having written 50 books on computing matters... blah blah waffle waffle. If they cannot get it right, then what hope have we of the people who read these books getting it right. If we are thinking that we have it licked with XML, then the evidence in print is very far from that scenario. A lot more work needs to be done to promote Year-Month-Day working. Even many of the 'experts' on XML do not seem to have heard of it, are not writing about it, and are not pushing the idea out to their millions of readers. Please can everyone on this mailing list, check out a few books in your local bookstore, and start contacting these authors, so that they may put the matter right. Let's go educate the 'experts'. Cheers, Ian. mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
