[Sigia-l] display of date in multilanguage portal

[Jon Hanna]

> Thanks to John for correcting me on the ISO date standard.

No problem Karhl :)

>   A Summary of the International Standard Date and Time Notation
>   by Markus Kuhn
>   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Other useful links:

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime is a profile of ISO 8601, commonly
referred to as W3CDTF. While that document is a note (and hence informal) it
is formally used and mandated by several other standards.
Most notably, it is the format datetime attributes in HTML MUST be in (in
the <ins> and <del> elements), is probably the most commonly used datetime
schema in Dublin Core, is directly supported in XML Schema and generally
pops up all over the place. If you will ever be using a datetime on the web
other than at the human-reader level this is a must-read.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/ defines several types related to dates and
times, all of which are based on ISO 8601, and one of which codifies W3CDTF.
Even if you don't use XML Schemata the types defined here, and the
information in Appendix D can be useful.

Aside: Anyone recognising that the Z used to mean GMT/UTC is borrowed from
the US military might wonder what happened to the other letters. Perhaps
this is related to the fact that RFC 822 used them incorrectly (and
contradicted itself in its own examples) leading to confusion as to the
value of all the codes except for Z, which was the same in both the correct
and incorrect versions.