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5 <TITLE>International Standard Date and Time Notation
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12 specifies numeric representations of date and time. It helps to avoid
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17 <H1>A Summary of the International Standard Date and Time Notation
</H1>
21 <P><A HREF=
"http://www.iso.ch/markete/8601.pdf">International Standard
22 ISO
8601</A> specifies numeric representations of date and time. This
23 standard notation helps to avoid confusion in international
24 communication caused by the many different national notations and
25 increases the portability of computer user interfaces. In addition,
26 these formats have several important advantages for computer usage
27 compared to other traditional date and time notations. The time
28 notation described here is already the de-facto standard in almost all
29 countries and the date notation is becoming increasingly popular.
31 <P><STRONG>Especially authors of Web pages and software engineers who
32 design user interfaces, file formats, and communication protocols
33 should be familiar with ISO
8601.
</STRONG>
35 <P>Contents:
<A HREF=
"#date">Date
</A>,
<A HREF=
"#time">Time of Day
</A>,
36 <A HREF=
"#zone">Time Zone
</A>.
38 <H2><A NAME=
"date">Date
</A></H2>
40 <P>The international standard date notation is
42 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>YYYY-MM-DD
</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
44 <P>where YYYY is the year in the usual Gregorian calendar, MM is the
45 month of the year between
01 (January) and
12 (December), and DD is
46 the day of the month between
01 and
31.
48 <P>For example, the fourth day of February in the year
1995 is written
49 in the standard notation as
51 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>1995-
02-
04</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
53 <P>Other commonly used notations are e.g.
2/
4/
95,
4/
2/
95,
95/
2/
4,
54 4.2.1995,
04-FEB-
1995,
4-February-
1995, and many more. Especially the
55 first two examples are dangerous, because as both are used quite often
56 in the U.S. and in Great Britain and both can not be distinguished, it
57 is unclear whether
2/
4/
95 means
1995-
04-
02 or
1995-
02-
04. The date
58 notation
2/
4/
5 has at least six reasonable interpretations (assuming
59 that only the twentieth and twenty-first century are reasonable
60 candidates in our life time).
62 <P>Advantages of the ISO
8601 standard date notation compared to other
63 commonly used variants:
66 <LI>easily readable and writeable by software (no 'JAN', 'FEB', ...
68 <LI>easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison
69 <LI>language independent
70 <LI>can not be confused with other popular date notations
71 <LI>consistency with the common
24h time notation system, where
72 the larger units (hours) are also written in front of the smaller
73 ones (minutes and seconds)
74 <LI>strings containing a date followed by a time are also
75 easily comparable and sortable (e.g. write "
1995-
02-
04 22:
45:
00")
76 <LI>the notation is short and has constant length, which makes both
77 keyboard data entry and table layout easier
78 <LI>identical to the Chinese date notation, so the largest cultural
79 group (
>25%) on this planet is already familiar with it :-)
80 <LI>date notations with the order "year, month, day" are in addition
81 already widely used e.g. in Japan, Korea, Hungary, Sweden, Finland,
82 Denmark, and a few other countries and people in the U.S. are already
83 used to at least the "month, day" order
84 <LI>a
4-digit year representation avoids
85 <A HREF=
"http://www.year2000.com/cgi-bin/clock.cgi">overflow
86 problems after
1999-
12-
31</A>
89 <P>As dates will look a little bit strange anyway starting with
90 2000-
01-
01 (e.g. like
1/
1/
0), it has been suggested that the year
2000
91 is an excellent opportunity to change to the standard date notation.
93 <P>ISO
8601 is only specifying numeric notations and does not cover
94 dates and times where words are used in the representation. It is not
95 intended as a replacement for language-dependent worded date notations
96 such as "
24. Dezember
2001" (German) or "February
4,
1995" (US
97 English). ISO
8601 should however be used to replace notations such as
98 "
2/
4/
95" and "
9.30 p.m.".
100 <P>Apart from the recommended primary standard notation
101 <STRONG>YYYY-MM-DD
</STRONG>, ISO
8601 also specifies a number of
102 alternative formats for use in applications with special requirements.
103 All of these alternatives can easily and automatically be
104 distinguished from each other:
106 <P>The hyphens can be omitted if compactness of the representation is
107 more important than human readability, for example as in
109 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>19950204</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
111 <P>For situations where information about the century is really not
112 required, a
2-digit year representation is available:
114 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>95-
02-
04</STRONG> or
115 <STRONG>950204</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
117 <P>If only the month or even only the year is of interest:
119 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>1995-
02</STRONG> or
120 <STRONG>1995</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
122 <P>In commercial and industrial applications (delivery times,
123 production plans, etc.), especially in Europe, it is often required to
124 refer to a week of a year. Week
01 of a year is per definition the
125 first week that has the Thursday in this year, which is equivalent to
126 the week that contains the fourth day of January. In other words, the
127 first week of a new year is the week that has the majority of its
128 days in the new year. Week
01 might also contain days from the
129 previous year and the week before week
01 of a year is the last week
130 (
52 or
53) of the previous year even if it contains days from the new
131 year. A week starts with Monday (day
1) and ends with Sunday (day
7).
132 For example, the first week of the year
1997 lasts from
1996-
12-
30 to
133 1997-
01-
05 and can be written in standard notation as
135 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>1997-W01
</STRONG> or
136 <STRONG>1997W01
</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
138 <P>The week notation can also be extended by a number indicating the
139 day of the week. For example, the day
1996-
12-
31, which is the Tuesday
140 (day
2) of the first week of
1997, can also be written as
142 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>1997-W01-
2</STRONG> or
143 <STRONG>1997W012
</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
145 <P>for applications like industrial planning where many things like
146 shift rotations are organized per week and knowing the week number and
147 the day of the week is more handy than knowing the day of the month.
149 <P>An abbreviated version of the year and week number like
151 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>95W05
</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
153 <P>is sometimes useful as a compact code printed on a product that
154 indicates when it has been manufactured.
156 <P>The ISO standard avoids explicitly stating the possible range of
157 week numbers, but this can easily be deduced from the definition:
161 <P><STRONG>Theorem:
</STRONG> Possible ISO week numbers are in the
162 range
01 to
53. A year always has a week
52. (There is one historic
163 exception: the year in which the Gregorian calendar was introduced had
164 less than
365 days and less than
52 weeks.)
166 <P><STRONG>Proof:
</STRONG> Per definition, the first week of a year is
167 W01 and consequently days before week W01 belong to the previous year
168 and so there is no week with lower numbers. Considering the highest
169 possible week number, the worst case is a leap year like
1976 that
170 starts with a Thursday, because this keeps the highest possible number
171 of days of W01 in the previous year, i.e.
3 days. In this case, the
172 Sunday of W52 of the worst case year is day number
4+
51*
7=
361 and
173 361-
366=
5 days of W53 belong still to this year, which guarantees that
174 in the worst case year day
4 (Thursday) of W53 is not yet in the next
175 year, so a week number
53 is possible. For example, the
53 weeks of
176 the worst case year
1976 started with
1975-
12-
29 =
1976-W01-
1 and
177 ended with
1977-
01-
02 =
1976-W53-
7. On the other hand, considering the
178 lowest number of the last week of a year, the worst case is a non-leap
179 year like
1999 that starts with a Friday, which ensures that the first
180 three days of the year belong to the last week of the previous year.
181 In this case, the Sunday of week
52 would be day number
3+
52*
7=
367,
182 i.e. only the last
367-
365=
2 days of the W52 reach into the next year
183 and consequently, even a worst case year like
1999 has a week W52
184 including the days
1999-
12-
27 to
2000-
01-
02. q.e.d.
188 <P>[Unfortunately, the current version of the C programming language
189 standard provides in the
<CODE>strftime()
</CODE> function no means to
190 generate the ISO
8601 week notation. A required extension would be
191 four new formatting codes: for the year of the week to which the
192 specified day belongs (both
2-digit and
4-digit), for the number of
193 the week between
01 and
53, and for the day of the week between
1
194 (Monday) and
7 (Sunday). Another trivial mistake in the description of
195 <CODE>strftime()
</CODE> in the C standard is that the range of seconds
196 goes from
00 to
61, because at one time only one single leap second
60
197 can be inserted into UTC and consequently there will never be a leap
198 second
61. Contribution
<A
199 HREF=
"http://www.gold.net/users/cdwf/c/wg14n764.txt">N764
</A> to the
200 <A HREF=
"ftp://dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/wg14/index.html">ISO C committee
</A>
201 suggests to fix some of this in the next revision of the ISO C
202 standard. The author of this text has also developed a proposal for a
203 <A HREF=
"c-time/">modernised clock and calendar API
</A> for C, which
204 provides full proper treatment of leap seconds and timezones and fixes
205 numerous other problems in the current C timing library functions. It
206 also serves as an excellent model for those who want to design clock
207 library functions for other programming languages.]
209 <P>Both day and year are useful units of structuring time, because the
210 position of the sun on the sky, which influences our lives, is
211 described by them. However the
12 months of a year are of some obscure
212 mystic origin and have no real purpose today except that people are
213 used to having them (they do not even describe the current position of
214 the moon). In some applications, a date notation is preferred that
215 uses only the year and the day of the year between
001 and
365 (
366 in
216 leap years). The standard notation for this variant representing
217 the day
1995-
02-
04 (that is day
035 of the year
1995) is
219 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>1995-
035</STRONG> or
220 <STRONG>1995035</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
222 <P>Leap years are years with an additional day YYYY-
02-
29, where the
223 year number is a multiple of four with the following exception: If a
224 year is a multiple of
100, then it is only a leap year if it is also a
225 multiple of
400. For example,
1900 was not a leap year, but
2000 is one.
227 <H2><A NAME=
"time">Time of Day
</A></H2>
229 <P>The international standard notation for the time of day is
231 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>hh:mm:ss
</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
233 <P>where hh is the number of complete hours that have passed since
234 midnight (
00-
24), mm is the number of complete minutes that have
235 passed since the start of the hour (
00-
59), and ss is the number of
236 complete seconds since the start of the minute (
00-
59). If the hour
237 value is
24, then the minute and second values must be zero. [Although
238 ISO
8601 does not mention this, the value
60 for ss might sometimes be
239 needed during an inserted
<A
240 HREF=
"http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leap.html">leap second
</A> in an
241 atomic time scale like Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). A single leap
242 second
23:
59:
60 is inserted into the UTC time scale every few years as
243 announced by the
<A HREF=
"http://hpiers.obspm.fr/">International Earth
244 Rotation Service
</A> in Paris to keep UTC from wandering away more
245 than
0.9 s from the less constant astronomical time scale UT1
246 that is defined by the actual rotation of the earth.]
249 <P>An example time is
251 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>23:
59:
59</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
253 <P>which represents the time one second before midnight.
255 <P>As with the date notation, the separating colons can also be
258 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>235959</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
260 <P>and the precision can be reduced by omitting the seconds or both
261 the seconds and minutes as in
263 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>23:
59</STRONG>,
<STRONG>2359</STRONG>, or
264 <STRONG>23</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
266 <P>It is also possible to add fractions of a second after a decimal
267 dot or comma, for instance the time
5.8 ms before midnight can be
270 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>23:
59:
59.9942</STRONG> or
271 <STRONG>235959.9942</STRONG> </BLOCKQUOTE>
273 <P>As every day both starts and ends with midnight, the two notations
274 <STRONG>00:
00</STRONG> and
<STRONG>24:
00</STRONG> are available to
275 distinguish the two midnights that can be associated with one date.
276 This means that the following two notations refer to exactly the same
279 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>1995-
02-
04 24:
00</STRONG> =
280 <STRONG>1995-
02-
05 00:
00</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
282 <P>In case an unambiguous representation of time is required,
00:
00 is
283 usually the preferred notation for midnight and not
24:
00. Digital
284 clocks display
00:
00 and not
24:
00.
286 <P>ISO
8601 does not specify, whether its notations specify a point in
287 time or a time period. This means for example that ISO
8601 does not
288 define whether
09:
00 refers to the exact end of the ninth hour of the
289 day or the period from
09:
00 to
09:
01 or anything else. The users of
290 the standard must somehow agree on the exact interpretation of the
291 time notation if this should be of any concern.
293 <P>If a date and a time are displayed on the same line, then always
294 write the date in front of the time. If a date and a time value are
295 stored together in a single data field, then ISO
8601 suggests that
296 they should be separated by a latin capital letter T, as in
297 <STRONG>19951231T235959
</STRONG>.
299 <P>A remark for readers from the U.S.:
301 <BLOCKQUOTE><P>The
24h time notation specified here has already been
302 the de-facto standard all over the world in written language for
303 decades. The only exception are some English speaking countries, where
304 still notations with hours between
1 and
12 and additions like "a.m."
305 and "p.m." are in wide use. The common
24h international standard
306 notation starts to get widely used now even in England. Most other
307 languages don't even have abbreviations like "a.m." and "p.m." and the
308 12h notation is certainly hardly ever used on Continental Europe to
309 write or display a time. Even in the U.S., the military and computer
310 programmers have been using the
24h notation for a long time.
312 <P>The old English
12h notation has many disadvantages like:
315 <LI> It is longer than the normal
24h notation.
316 <LI> It takes somewhat more time for humans to compare two times
318 <LI> It is not clear, how
00:
00,
12:
00 and
24:
00 are represented.
319 Even encyclopedias and style manuals contain contradicting
320 descriptions and a common quick fix seems to be to avoid
321 "
12:
00 a.m./p.m." altogether and write "noon", "midnight", or
322 "
12:
01 a.m./p.m." instead, although the word "midnight" still
323 does not distinguish between
00:
00 and
24:
00.
324 <LI> It makes people often believe that the next day starts at the
325 overflow from "
12:
59 a.m." to "
1:
00 a.m.", which is a common
326 problem not only when people try to program the timer of VCRs
327 shortly after midnight.
328 <LI> It is not easily comparable with a string compare operation.
329 <LI> It is not immediately clear for the unaware, whether the
330 time between "
12:
00 a.m./p.m." and "
1:
00 a.m./p.m." starts
331 at
00:
00 or at
12:
00, i.e. the English
12h notation is more
332 difficult to understand.
335 <P>Please consider the
12h time to be a relic from the dark ages when
336 Roman numerals were used, the number zero had not yet been invented
337 and analog clocks were the only known form of displaying a
338 time. Please avoid using it today, especially in technical
339 applications! Even in the U.S., the widely respected
<CITE>Chicago
340 Manual of Style
</CITE> now recommends using the international
341 standard time notation in publications.
345 <P>A remark for readers from German speaking countries:
347 <BLOCKQUOTE><P>In May
1996, the German standard DIN
5008, which
348 specifies typographical rules for German texts written on typewriters,
349 has been updated. The old German numeric date notations DD.MM.YYYY and
350 DD.MM.YY have been replaced by the ISO date notations YYYY-MM-DD and
351 YY-MM-DD. Similarly, the old German time notations hh.mm and hh.mm.ss
352 have been replaced by the ISO notations hh:mm and hh:mm:ss. Those new
353 notations are now also mentioned in the latest edition of the
354 <CITE>Duden
</CITE>. The German alphanumeric date notation continues to
355 be for example "
3. August
1994" or "
3. Aug.
1994". The corresponding
356 Austrian standard has already used the ISO
8601 date and time
359 <P>ISO
8601 has been adopted as European Standard EN
28601 and is
360 therefore now a valid standard in all EU countries and all conflicting
361 national standards have been changed accordingly.
364 <H2><A NAME=
"zone">Time Zone
</A></H2>
366 <P>Without any further additions, a date and time as written above is
367 assumed to be in some local time zone. In order to indicate that a
368 time is measured in
<A HREF=
"http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA/faq/docs/UT.html"
369 >Universal Time (UTC)
</A>, you can append a capital
370 letter
<STRONG>Z
</STRONG> to a time as in
372 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>23:
59:
59Z
</STRONG> or
<STRONG>2359Z
</STRONG>
375 <P>[The Z stands for the "zero meridian", which goes through Greenwich
376 in London, and it is also commonly used in radio communication where
377 it is pronounced "Zulu" (the word for Z in the international radio
379 "http://www.apparent-wind.com/gmt-explained.html">Universal
380 Time
</A> (sometimes also called "Zulu Time") was called Greenwich Mean
381 Time (GMT) before
1972, however this term should no longer be
382 used. Since the introduction of an international atomic time scale,
383 almost all existing civil time zones are now related to UTC, which is
384 slightly different from the old and now unused GMT.]
388 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>+hh:mm
</STRONG>,
<STRONG>+hhmm
</STRONG>, or
389 <STRONG>+hh
</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
391 <P>can be added to the time to indicate that the used local time zone
392 is hh hours and mm minutes ahead of UTC. For time zones west of the
393 zero meridian, which are behind UTC, the notation
395 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>-hh:mm
</STRONG>,
<STRONG>-hhmm
</STRONG>, or
396 <STRONG>-hh
</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
398 <P>is used instead. For example, Central European Time (CET) is +
0100
399 and U.S./Canadian Eastern Standard Time (EST) is -
0500. The following
400 strings all indicate the same point of time:
402 <BLOCKQUOTE><P><STRONG>12:
00Z
</STRONG> =
<STRONG>13:
00+
01:
00</STRONG>
403 =
<STRONG>0700-
0500</STRONG></BLOCKQUOTE>
405 <P>There exists no international standard that specifies
406 abbreviations for civil time zones like CET, EST, etc. and sometimes
407 the same abbreviation is even used for two very different time zones.
408 In addition, politicians enjoy modifying the rules for civil time
409 zones, especially for daylight saving times, every few years, so the
410 only really reliable way of describing a local time zone is to specify
411 numerically the difference of local time to UTC. Better use directly
412 UTC as your only time zone where this is possible and then you do not
413 have to worry about time zones and daylight saving time changes at
416 <H2><A NAME=
"tz">More Information about Time Zones
</A></H2>
418 <P><A HREF=
"mailto:ado@elsie.nci.nih.gov">Arthur David Olson
</A> and
419 others maintain a
<A HREF=
420 "http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm">database of all current and
421 many historic time zone changes and daylight saving time
422 algorithms
</A>. It is available via ftp from
<A
423 HREF=
"ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/">elsie.nci.nih.gov
</A> in the
424 <SAMP>tzcode*
</SAMP> and
<SAMP>tzdata*
</SAMP> files. Most Unix time
425 zone handling implementations are based on this package. If you want
426 to join the
<SAMP>tz
</SAMP> mailing list, which is dedicated to
427 discussions about time zones and this software, please send a request
428 for subscription to
<A HREF=
"mailto:tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov"
429 >tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.gov
</A>. You can read previous discussion
430 there in the
<A HREF=
"ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz">tz
433 <H2><A NAME=
"other">Other Links about Date, Time, and Calendars
</A></H2>
435 <P>Some other interesting sources of information about date and time
436 on the Internet are for example the
<A
437 HREF=
"http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/glossary.htm">Glossary of
438 Frequency and Timing Terms
</A> and the
<A
439 HREF=
"http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/faq/faq.htm">FAQ
</A>
440 provided by
<A HREF=
"http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/">NIST
</A>,
442 "http://www.yahoo.com/Science/Measurements_and_Units/Time/" >Yahoo
443 Science:Measurements and Units:Time
</A> link collection, the
<A
444 HREF=
"http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/">U.S. Naval Observatory Server
</A>,
445 the
<A HREF=
"http://hpiers.obspm.fr/"> International Earth Rotation
446 Service (IERS)
</A> (for time gurus only!), the
<A
447 HREF=
"http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/">University of Delaware NTP Time
448 Server
</A>, the time and calendar section of the
<A
449 HREF=
"http://sciastro.astronomy.net/sci.astro.3.FAQ">USENET sci.astro
450 FAQ
</A>, and the
<A HREF=
451 "http://www.tondering.dk/claus/calendar.html">Calendar FAQ
</A>.
455 <P>This was a brief overview of the ISO
8601 standard, which covers
456 only the most useful notations and includes some additional related
457 information. The full standard defines in addition a number of more
458 exotic notations including some for periods of time. The
<A HREF=
459 "http://www.iso.ch/cate/d15903.html">ISO
8601:
1988 document
</A> is
460 fortunately now also
<A
461 HREF=
"http://www.iso.ch/markete/8601.pdf">available online
</A>, or you
462 can order a paper copy from
465 <A HREF=
"http://www.iso.ch/">International Organization
466 for Standardization
</A><BR>
468 1, rue de Varemb
é<BR>
469 CH-
1211 Gen
ève
20<BR>
472 phone: +
41 22 749 01 11<BR>
473 fax: +
41 22 733 34 30<BR>
474 email:
<A HREF=
"mailto:sales@isocs.iso.ch">sales@isocs.iso.ch
</A>
477 <P>A more detailed online summary of ISO
8601 than this one is the
478 text
<CITE>ISO
8601:
1988 Date/Time Representations
</CITE> available
480 "ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/doc/ISO/ISO8601.ps.Z">
481 ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/doc/ISO/ISO8601.ps.Z
</A>
482 (PostScript,
16 kb,
5 pages) written by
<A HREF=
483 "mailto:Gary.Houston@actrix.gen.nz">Gary Houston
</A>, now also
484 available in
<A HREF=
485 "http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Technical/SGML/doc/iso8601/ISO8601.html"
486 >HTML
</A>. Ian Galpin (G1SMD) proposes to use ISO
8601 as a
<A
487 HREF=
"http://www.kirsta.demon.co.uk/radio/iso_8601.htm">Common Date-Time
488 Standard for Amateur Radio
</A>.
<A
489 HREF=
"http://www.saqqara.demon.co.uk/">Steve Adams
</A> has written
<A
490 HREF=
"http://www.saqqara.demon.co.uk/datefmt.htm">another web
491 page
</A> about the ISO date format that is partially based on this
494 <P>ISO TC
154 decided in
1996 to revise ISO
8601.
<A
495 HREF=
"mailto:Louis.Visser@nni.nl">Louis Visser
</A> is coordinating
496 this project. If you want to contribute to this work, you should
497 contact your
<A HREF=
498 "http://www.iso.ch/addresse/address.html">national ISO member
499 organization
</A>.
<!-- Have a look at the <A HREF="8601v04.pdf">1998-01
500 draft of the forthcoming ISO 8601:1999</A>.-->
504 <P>I wish to thank
<A HREF=
"http://emr.cs.uiuc.edu/~reingold">Edward
505 M. Reingold
</A> for developing the fine GNU Emacs calendar functions,
506 as well as
<A HREF=
"http://yank.kitchener.on.ca/~richw">Rich Wales
</A>,
507 <A HREF=
"mailto:msb@sq.com">Mark Brader
</A>,
<A
508 HREF=
"mailto:eggert%yata.UUCP@twinsun.com">Paul Eggert
</A>, and others
509 in the
<A HREF=
"news:comp.std.internat">comp.std.internat
</A>,
<A
510 HREF=
"news:comp.protocols.time.ntp">comp.protocols.time.ntp
</A>, and
511 <A HREF=
"news:sci.astro">sci.astro
</A> USENET discussion groups for
512 valuable comments about this text. Further comments and hyperlinks to
513 this page are very welcome.
515 <P>Some journalists recently got interested in the international date
516 and time format and reported about it. Examples include:
518 <LI>An article by
<A HREF=
"mailto:Jon.Auerbach@news.wsj.com">Jon G.
519 Auerbach
</A> in the
1999-
06-
01 issue of the Wall Street Journal, page
522 <P>If you are a journalist and need information on this or related
523 topics, please feel free to contact me.
525 <P>You might also be interested in the
<A
526 HREF=
"http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html">International
527 Standard Paper Sizes
</A> Web page.
529 <P><A HREF=
"http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/">
530 Markus Kuhn
</A> <A HREF=
"mailto:Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk"
531 ><Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk
></A>
532 <BR><SMALL>created
1995 -- last modified
2000-
01-
24 --
533 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
</SMALL>