So, after looking at the original Standard Date & Time Act, I’ve realised that it has an implication beyond just legislation. As an example of this, if an Arbiter reconfirmation fails and the Magisterium reminds the Delegate that they have 7 days to come up with a new nomination, because that’s a legal deadline (as it is mandated in the Concordat) that must follow the Standard Date & Time Act.
I definitely don’t like the inclusion of Unix timestamps, as that would have very little frame of reference for anyone outside of IT or niche uses (like setting Discord timestamps) - 1757340728 doesn’t really mean much to anyone.
I concur with Ladona on the subject of unix timestamps. They’re a completely unintuitive format.
I’d like to ask wiser and more experienced Magisters if the absence of the ampersand is normal in this subclause:
The name of the statute is “Standard Date & Time Act”, after all.
Regardless, Luck does point out the fact that there’s an issue with clutter in our legislation. That’s something that I fully agree with him on, and would wish to see reduced where possible. In striving to include Ladona’s suggestion to guarantee that the standard for dates and time is consistent throughout more than just our legislation, I’ve attempted to incorporate it into the Law Standards Act like so:
Section III. FORMATS
[…]
6. All official deadlines must follow this standard, with date formats using the Discourse standard (YYYY-MM-DD, Universal Coordinated Time, UTC) wherever applicable. Examples are displayed in Appendix A*.
…1. All dates used for official purposes on The Forums must follow the format YYYY-MM-DD, where YYYY is the year the event will occur, MM is the month the event will occur, and DD is the day the event will occur. Examples of this are displayed in Appendix A.
Really, I would welcome a combination of the two statutes into one similar to the above.
*This Appendix A would have to be added, naturally.
I’m still wary of including merging the changes into the Law Standards Act simply because it has impacts beyond just defining a standard format for laws to follow. Maybe if the Act were renamed to the Formatting Standards Act, Section III renamed to LAW FORMATS and a new Section IV added called DATE AND TIME FORMATS?
Regardless of where the amendment gets made, I would very much like to see:
Removal of UTC as a mandatory timezone to use.
Removal of term “Discourse standard”, as while this is all addressed in ISO 8601, there’s three formats that need to be followed; one for dates, one for times, one for datetimes.
Edited this to specify the correct implementation of timezone, add the use of timezone in [date-range] tags for correct conversion, and to properly number 4.2.7.
→ Included .1 to define YYYY-MM-DD for places like arbiters where they might just need the date and not date tag
→ Merged Date and Date-Range into .2 since functionally both of them need the same details
Also removed the wikipedia example of example timezones, since if it weren’t listed, the forums would just reject it and break the code
[date] and [date-range] have different arguments. date requires date=YYYY-MM-DD and optionally takes time=hh:mm:ss. date-range requires from=YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss, and to=YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss (note the delineating T character between the date and time as well as the different argument names). The details required are conceptually different (date requires a single date, while date-range requires a start date and an end date) and have different implementations, hence their original separation.
Also, the Wikipedia link was in there so that people could actually find their timezones to begin with as UTC representation (UTC+11) is more common than tz-database representation (Australia\Sydney) unless you’re in IT.
Ye that’s right, but I don’t think we need to go into such detail since that’s going into the mechanisms of date v date range.
My intention was [if you’re using date or date range, you need that YYYY-MM-DD, HH:MM:SS, and TZ]
How one wants to write it, whether they need to phrase it as YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss, or add a from:YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss (in the case of date range), is up to them and limited by forum mechanisms.
The law wouldn’t say one needs to follow “from-to” for date range, but one does it because its a technical limitation. To use date range is to include “from-to”.
So the law just says - “Go include YYYY-MM-DD, go put HH:MM:SS and tz where applicable. How you want to format in accordance with whatever date/date range demands is up to you”
[date-range] should not include date=YYYY-MM-DD, because it’s invalid for the tag. Ultimately, it’s going to be used as a reference for people who don’t know how how to properly use the tag and want to know how to use it so they can format dates/date-ranges properly, so the information available should be as accurate as possible, especially when generalising it leads to the information presented being factually wrong.