[Tagging] Date formatting proposal

[Andrew Errington]

On Thu, November 11, 2010 04:56, Laurence Penney wrote:
> I'm posting here a link to a proposal for date formatting that I just
> added to the start_date wiki page:
<snip>
> Comments welcome! Please follow up either here or on the Discussion page
> on the wiki.

IMHO the right answer is ISO8601:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

It can be as precise as we need, from a year only, down to a fraction of a
second.

My suggestion would be to use it as follows:

2010 (Year only)
2010-11 (Year/month)
2010-11-11 (Year/month/day)
2010-11-11T08 (Year/month/day/hour)
2010-11-11T08:57 (Year/month/day/hour/minute)

The key points when specifying the use of ISO8601 would be to use the
human-readable form (with dashes for date separators, and colons for time
separators, and T between date and time), to include leading zeroes for
date or time parts <10, and to stipulate that the time is the local time
in the region occupied by the node, way or area.

Best wishes,

Andrew