ISO/IEC 8601:1988, a document entitled 'Date elements and interchange formats - Information interchange - Representation of dates and times' is a useful international standard for date interchange. It is not intended, however, to be adopted in place of national conventions for presentation of date and time. It avoids national entanglements and problems by using a single set of formats for information interchange.
While these formats could be easily recognized and interpreted, they will most often be converted automatically for presentation to the end user. The ISO/IEC 8601 format relies on the Gregorian calendar, and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The term UTC or its variant, UT, has replaced Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The standard is extensive, but it can be appreciated using the example of the date and local 24-hour clock time combination (timestamp). A timestamp presents year-month-day-(T)-hour-minute-second, in the format: CCYYMMDDThhmmss (or variations). For example, 20040412T101530, or 2004-04-12T10:15:30, where local time is assumed unless the string ends in "Z". (Note: a string ending in Z means UTC.) |
