The more I thought about this the more my thinking was driven by what various datetime libraries allow the developer to do. While in a perfect world I’d prefer the ISO 8601 “just specify what you know” (which allows 2016-01-01 for example to say January 1, 2016), libraries that support 8601 don’t seem to give the developer any way of distinguishing between “2016-01-01” and “2016-01-01T00:00:00.0Z”. Therefore, we’re better off going with RFC 3339 which mandates a full date/time and the separate precision specifier we’ve previously discussed. As far as fractional seconds, I say we allow zero or more digits – the libraries support that, it’s compliant with RFC 3339 and at the F2F no one could articulate a reason why that was a burden to implementers.
So, in summary:
RFC 3339
All times expressed in UTC (“Z”)
Separate precision specifier
From: [mailto:] On Behalf Of Jordan, Bret
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2016 10:58 AM
To:
Subject: [cti] Re: Timestamps, yet again
Thoughts??? We really need to decide this. This along with IDs are the next major things we need to resolve and resolve SOON.
Thanks,
Bret
Bret Jordan CISSP
Director of Security Architecture and Standards | Office of the CTO
Blue Coat Systems
PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050
"Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg."
On Jan 14, 2016, at 22:19, Jordan, Bret <> wrote:
As this issue was brought up at the Face2Face, and thus reopened for debate and consensus, and the consensus today was leaning toward the use of RFC3339 as is, without further stipulation and the removal of timestamp_precision field, I thought it would be best to re-read the RFC for clarification.
Section 4.2. Local Offsets
Allows for local time, so long as it is an offset from UTC
5.8. Examples
1996-12-19T16:39:57-08:00
I do not see anything in RFC3339 that allows for dates/times with less precision than a fully qualified timestamp: yyyymmddThh:mm:ssZ
ISO8601 does explicitly allow for reduced precision by just truncating the value.
From my understanding of the community we have the following requirements:
1) Represent reduced precision
2015Z
201501Z
20150114Z
20150114T23Z
20150114T23:21Z
20150114T23:21:20Z
20150114T23:21:20.1Z
20150114T23:21:20.12Z
20150114T23:21:20.123Z
etc.
2) Represent an arbitrary number of fractional sections
20150114T23:21:20.1Z
20150114T23:21:20.12Z
20150114T23:21:20.123Z
etc.
3) Represent values in local time as a offset to UTC or in UTC
20150114T23:21:20.123456Z
20150114T23:21:20.123456-08:00
Thanks,
Bret
Bret Jordan CISSP
Director of Security Architecture and Standards | Office of the CTO
Blue Coat Systems
PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050
"Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg."
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