[CF-metadata] New standard name: datetime_iso8601

From: Aleksandar Jelenak - NOAA Affiliate <aleksandar.jelenak>
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:26:27 -0400

I fully support John Caron's proposal of having ISO 8601 datetime
strings as another way for encoding time data. But I proposed a
standard name so would like to return to that.

>From a few replies so far it seems that many interpret this standard
name proposal as a fundamental change of the convention. I don't see
it that way. My intention was to enhance the interoperability for such
data by specifying a limited subset of ISO8601 datetime string
formats. Note that having such variables does not break the convention
as long as they are not coordinate variables.

Can I have the final decision, please?

     -Aleksandar

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:39 PM, John Caron <caron at unidata.ucar.edu> wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> Ok, its friday afternoon so ill bite on this, and wax philosophical even
> before the beer.
>
> An insidious mistake is to think that problems should be fixed in software
> libraries. Actually the deep mistake is to mistake the reference software
> with the file encoding. Why bother fixing the encoding when a few lines in
> _your_ software can fix the problem transparently? Ive seen this occur in
> all three of the great western religious systems of our day: netCDF, HDF and
> OPeNDAP libraries.
>
> Better is to do the encoding of information as cleanly as possible.
> Post-apocalyptic software engineers who have lost all knowledge of what
> netCDF and CF mean and are painstakingly uncovering climate archives with
> their whisk brooms will thank us.
>
> "35246 hours since 1970-01-01" isnt just unreadable; it uses a calendar
> system that may be non-trivial. Calendars are hard; Java has got it wrong
> already twice, and is now trying for a 3rd time (with jsr 310 in Java 8,
> based on experience with joda-time).
>
> "1974-01-08T14:00:00Z" ( == "35246 hours since 1970-01-01" in the standard
> calendar) is a better representation of that date. because at least you know
> what the user thought the damn date was.
>
> The good argument for "35246 hours since 1970-01-01" representation, is that
> given two of them, at least you know what the user thought the damn time
> interval is between them.
>
> Anyway, I think both are good, and should be allowed. Finish your beer and
> ill order another round.
>
> John
Received on Tue Mar 19 2013 - 10:26:27 GMT