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Thank you, Charles. I will send this on. Eileen >>> "Reitzel, Charlie" <[log in to unmask]> 12/13/00 04:42PM >>> Hi Eileen, As you know, ISO-8061 uses CCYY-MM (e.g. 2000-12) to represent the whole month as a time duration. This will be appropriate for use in any DC element where a whole day time duration (CCYY-MM-DD) would also be appropriate. Display for human consumption is a "presentation" issue. To this end, it is often convenient to simply use a day value of 1 (i.e. the 1st day of the month in question) and use the result complete date as input to whatever date printing utilities you are using. Typically, these use a format string in combination w/ the current locale to display the date in any number of formats: "Dec, 2000", "12/2000", "December 2000", etc. Examples include the "strftime" standard C library routine and w3.org's "TimeFormatter" Java utility class. For a few reasons, there are unlikely to be strong standards in this area: 1) Locale variation, 2) application requirements (e.g. saving space on screens and reports) and 3) date library variation. The important thing is to store the actual date values in a language and application neutral format so that the required output format is possible. Note that none of this takes into account data entry. Date parsing is more complicated. Typically, people want to entry things like "3/99" for "1999-03" or "3p" for "15:00:00-5:00", etc. Again, locale, application and library variations will all come into play. I'm sure you are familiar with most of these issues, but this is my take on it. regards, Charles Reitzel -----Original Message----- From: Eileen Quam [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 4:24 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: ISO date This question came from a MN state agency webmaster using my recommended ISO date standard. Any comments appreciated. I am having a problem with the ISO 8601 Date standard (i.e. 2000-12-13). There appears to be no way to express dates such as "August 2000" or "Spring-Summer 1999", which regularly appear on the items in question (I am building a citaiton database). Do you know if the DC community has bumped into this issue and come up with a preferred workaround (i.e. include the "human readable" format as a note...). I could translate to ISO8601 for the sake of storage/ordering, but want the natural language dates for display. Eileen Quam Information Architect Minnesota Dept. of Natural Resources [log in to unmask] 651.297.2341 651.297.4946 FAX