Thu, 24 Aug 2006
W3C Date and Time
Apparently W3C has defined its own date and time format, incompatible with anything else.
And what is worse, they use the "+HH:MM" format for the timezone
offset, which means W3C time format cannot be formated with
standard library's strftime(3) function.
POSIX (and ISO C99) defines
the "%Z" fromat string for the textual name of the time zone only.
GNU libc (and Perl as well) provide an extension "%z"
which leads to "+HHMM" format, suitable for formating
RFC822-style time zone offsets. But W3C had to invite yet another format,
this time with colon between hours and minutes. Why the standardization
organizations cannot reuse an existing practice, and have always to create
something different and difficult to produce with standard tools?
CPAN has DateTime::Format::W3CDTF,
so at least the Perl side is safe (altough I have not tried it yet, and from
their docs it is not clear how they handle the time zone at all). But
it uses the DateTime object as a time source, instead of
the return value of localtime() or gmtime().