Seth McGinnis said:
"I hesitate to support encouraging the use of the T because in my
experience, approximately 0% of existing NetCDF files have it."
a) We aren't advocating forbidding the older formats / saying that files
with those time formats will become invalid. This is a question of what we
should encourage. So the issue of what is in current files should be
irrelevant. Tons of .nc files have "days since 1-1-1" (which is a horrid
format). Just because a format is common is not a good reason to encourage
its use.
b) The CF community needs to respect (i.e., faithfully follow) other
standards, just as we ask people to respect our standard. Some in the CF
community might think that CF is a self-contained standard, but it isn't.
We rely on IEEE-754 for binary number formats, various charsets for
character encoding, the CRS Well Known Text Format, numerous calendar
standards, numerous projections, etc. These are all external standards that
we have included in CF simply by referencing them. We shouldn't slightly
modify any of these standards when we use them in .nc files. Similarly we
should cleanly adopt the ISO 8601:2004(E) standard format (with the T) for
date times. [Okay, it weakens my argument that ISO 8601 says that the T may
be omitted by mutual consent, but I think is is better for CF to recommend
the format that is clearly recommended by ISO 8601:2004(E) (i.e., with the
T).]
--
Sincerely,
Bob Simons
IT Specialist
Environmental Research Division
NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
99 Pacific St., Suite 255A (New!)
Monterey, CA 93940 (New!)
Phone: (831)333-9878 (New!)
Fax: (831)648-8440
Email: bob.simons at noaa.gov
The contents of this message are mine personally and
do not necessarily reflect any position of the
Government or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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