Stu Weibel has given me permission to quote from his private mail:
> Where you have YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm-hh:mm, is it possible to interpose a
> seperator other than T that makes it clearer to the human eye where
> the date ends and Time begins? I suspect the answer to this is that
> such a separator would knock the profile out of whack with 8601, but
> I thought I'd ask anyhow.
The "T" is, I think, the most despised aspect of the ISO 8601 standard
but I think we're stuck with it. Some relevant quotes from the
standard:
[T] is used as a time designator to indicate the start of the
representation of the time of day in combined date and time of day
expressions;
The space character shall not be used in the representations.
The only suggestion I have seen for getting rid of the "T" is a kind of
trick: We say that we are representing not a "combined date and time"
but rather a separate date and a time. We then place them next to each
other, separated by our favourite character. If "*" represents our
favourite character, we get:
1994-11-05*08:15:30-05:00
instead of:
1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00
The problem with this solution is precisely that it is a trick. In
reality, we are dealing with a single date-with-time and it confuses
things to pretend that we're not. Also, there must be lots of software
out there which is ISO 8601-conformant and would choke on our favourite
character.
I suggest we decide that this stuff isn't primarily for human
consumption and make use of it, warts and all.
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