[MOBY-dev] Dashboard and date types

[Iván Párraga García]

Hi,

Dashboard detects when an article name corresponds to a data type and
then calls the modal window "Date-Time Chooser" which is great but it
seems to me that it doesn't generate ISO 8601 compliant date/times as it
should.

This is an example of date/time generated:

2007-04-05T15:28:58Z+0200

If I understand well the standard (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime):

/"...This profile defines two ways of handling time zone offsets:

   1. Times are expressed in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), with a
special UTC designator ("Z").
   2. Times are expressed in local time, together with a time zone
offset in hours and minutes. A time zone offset of "+hh:mm" indicates
that the date/time uses a local time zone which is "hh" hours and "mm"
minutes ahead of UTC. A time zone offset of "-hh:mm" indicates that the
date/time uses a local time zone which is "hh" hours and "mm" minutes
behind UTC.

A standard referencing this profile should permit one or both of these
ways of handling time zone offsets..."

/- if "Z" is present, this means that we are at UTC time zone and then
there shouldn't be anything else after the "Z"
- if "Z" is no present, then time zone can be specified as
positive/negative offset with respect UTC

Some examples (extracted from the previous reference):

1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 corresponds to November 5, 1994, 8:15:30 am,
US Eastern Standard Time.
1994-11-05T13:15:30Z corresponds to the same instant.

I suppose that Dashboard should be corrected to produce date/time ISO
8601 compliant dates and some mechanism to determine the time zone where
the client is being executed should be introduced.

Please, let me know if I'm wrong.

Cheers,

-- 
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Iván Párraga García
Computer Scientist
Molecular Modelling & Bioinformatics Unit
INB - Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática
Josep Samitier 1-5
08028 Barcelona
Spain
tel.: +34 93 403 71 55
fax.: +34 93 403 71 57
e-mail: ivanp at mmb.pcb.ub.es
group page: http://mmb.pcb.ub.es 
pgp key: http://mmb.pcb.ub.es/~ivanp/pubkey.asc
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