Re:The I-JSON Message Format
by kjhughes on Monday March 23, 2015 @11:21AM
(#9251373)
One might wish for a strict requirement for date formats for better interoperability, but at least I-JSON recommends something: ISO 8601 [per RFC3339] (with additional restrictions - see section 4.3 which I've quoted elsewhere on this page).
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Relevant. https://xkcd.com/1179/
I love it. When I first started in IT (1994, don't ask...) working with London and Tokyo and San Fran and Singapore and everyone wrote dates differently. I just started writing YYYY-MM-DD everywhere, and all of the questions went away.
Looks like ISO-8601 to me! We've standardized on using this format (extended to include time where necessary) whenever our JSON objects include a date or date/time. We've also standardized on UTC. Since our system clocks are already synchronized that way, it's easy for us and we simply i18n/l12n them on entry and/or display.
It was, I just didn't know it at the time! I was simply looking for some way to write emails and spec docs in a way that everyone would have a common frame of reference with zero extra work.
Yeah, in storage (as above), I use epoch all the way through and convert as needed. But as the thread above shows, not everyone likes this path...
Yes, conformance to a single string representation of a datetime is nice. Unfortunately that still doesn't help the issue when deserializing, you're just going to get a string that needs to be manually converted to a Date object.