Hacker News Reader

This gets repeated a lot but unfortunately isn't true.

See the spec: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339

    NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T".
    Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of
    readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by
    (say) a space character.

Someday someone reading this is going to set out to make a new, small specification out of a huge specification. Reader, when you start to feel the temptation to make just the tiniest improvement-- resist! It's way more useful if it's actually a true subset.

Happily this particular issue is be easily fixed. Let's make a new spec, subsetting both ISO 8601 and RFC 3339.

I hereby introduce... RFC 3339T, which is exactly like RFC 3339, but you have to use a T instead of a space.

EDIT: joshuaissac spotted another difference.

Also I made a repo so we're official: https://github.com/seagreen/rfc-3339T

View on HN

An offset of zero, in addition to having the special representation "Z", can also be stated numerically as "+00:00", "+0000", or "+00". However, it is not permitted to state it numerically with a negative sign, as "−00:00", "−0000", or "−00"."