this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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ISO 8601 ftw rule (gregtech.eu)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

[email protected] gang, rise up

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

All my homies hate ISO

Said no-one ever?

EDIT: thanks for informing me i now retract my position

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their "standards" are blocked behind paywalls and can't be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).

Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.

In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here's a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

P1Y is period notation. It means a Period of 1 Year. It actually makes decent sense tbh.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sure, it means something, and the meaning is not stupid. But since it is the same standard, it should be possible to be used to at least somehow represent the same data. Which it doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I think it is reasonable to say: "for all representation of times (points in time, intervals and sets of points or intervals etc) we follow the same standard".

The alternative would be using one standard for points in time, another for intervals, another for time differences, another for changes to a timezone, another for ...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

True, that is reasonable. However sometimes it could be represented as scope creep. Depends on the thing, really. The more broad a standard is, the easier it is to deviate from given standard or not implement certain feature because there is not enough resources to do so.

I'd rather have multiple smaller standards than one big. However, I understand your reasoning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The alternative would be

More reasonable, if you ask me. At least I came to value modularity in programming, maybe with standards it doesn't work as good, but I don't see why

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Standards are used to increase interoperability between systems. The more different standards a single system needs the harder it is to interface with other systems. If you have to define a list of 50 standard you use, chances are the other system uses a different standard for at least one of them. Much easier if you rely on only a handful instead

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Makes sense. But then we're getting the standard that tries to define everything

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

if i am not wrong, it is because essentially both are same (slight differences in what is allowed and what is not, https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601), but RFC is more free as in freedom

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Thx i take that back