Robin Martherus wrote (appended) about the lack of support in ISO 8601 for:
(a) years before year 0000, and (b) years after year 9999.
The latter would seem easier to solve, through the use of additional digit(s).
The former is more of a challenge.
ISO is a federation of national member bodies. ISO standards come up for
revision every five years. ISO 8601 is currently being revised. If you want
it changed, the best thing is to get involved in the current revision through
your national member body (ANSI, if you're US-based) and/or through discussion
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Misha
> Hi there,
>
> I have been lurking on this list for about a year now and would like to get
> some input from you regarding ISO8601. My company wants to use the Dublin
> Core tags in one of our products. We would also like to use ISO8601 for
> storing dates in the DC.date tag as well as other date related fields but
> find the profile is lacking in the year area because it is limited to the
> years from 0000 to 9999.
>
> I know that Misha has already mentioned that this is a shortcoming and that
> those of us who need years outside of that range should use a diferent
> standard.
>
> What I would like to hear from you is what you recommend we use. We have
> been discussing the possiblity of using a modified ISO8601 by not limiting
> the year to 4 digits but using as many digits as are needed to represent
> the year. This should not become a problem while parsing because the
> various date/time elements already have delimiters seperating them.
>
> This would allow archeologists, peleontologists, geologists, etc to use the
> standard for recording dates well before 0000. Even librarians have works
> written by Plato and others well before the year 0000.
>
> If ISO8601 is not the solution for us what should we use?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Robin Martherus
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Robin Martherus [log in to unmask]
> Verano, Inc. phone 415/237-0207
> 411 Clyde Avenue fax 415/237-0211
> Mountain View, CA 94043
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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