VOEvent 20110215 notes

[Rob Seaman]

On Mar 17, 2011, at 4:23 PM, Steve Allen wrote:
> On Thu 2011-03-17T16:21:08 -0700, Bob Denny hath writ:
>> Norman Gray said:
>>> Sect 3.2.3: Are you accepting _all_ of ISO-8601?  I hope not.  The W3C ISO-8601 profile might be better <http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime.html>, aka W3CDTF.  Or even something more restricted than that.
>> 
>> I would strongly suggest we explicitly adopt the date/time format as understood
>> by XML (type="xs:dateTime"). This is indeed a sub-set of ISO-8601. Straying from
>> this would preclude machine parsing of dates within an XML code/object-model
>> binding.
> 
> The XML dateTime denies the existence of leap seconds, so if any
> timestamp for an event happens to coincide with one that will not
> allow it to be legally expressed.

Quashing my inclination to reply either briefly and ironically or sincerely and in detail...

There is no way the chair will permit VOEvent to be hijacked by the looming UTC apocalypse.  This is not only an IVOA-wide issue, not only ADASS-wide, not only Astronomy-wide, it literally is "worldwide" and is as such outside the bailiwick of this WG.

I'll review the phrasing in the current draft and defang whatever it is with suitably ambiguous but functional language.  Broader issues will be left for v2.1 or later after the smoke from UTC clear-cutting disperses.

VOEvent is going to be the least of our worries.

Rob