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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on July 6, 2008, 5:59 am
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Scripsit Andreas Prilop:
> - - International Standard ISO 8601 has been
> adopted as European Standard EN 28601.
EN 28601 has been withdrawn. (I can't check the exact date, but it was
in 2006 or earlier.)
> Your sample date should be written 2008-01-20. To prevent
> a line break, you might write the non-breaking hyphen ‑
> instead of the ASCII hyphen.
This is a tricky issue, and actually HTML related too.
Checking ISO 8601:2004, available via
http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/4021199/ISO_8601_2004_E.zip?func=doc.Fetch&nodeid=4021199
we can find that the standard does not quite exactly define the
characters used in notations, but fairly well. It clearly distinguishes
"hyphen", "minus", and "hyphen-minus" (i.e., the ASCII hyphen) as
different characters. The character to be used in a notation like
2008-01-20 is called hyphen, so in conjunction with the distinction I
mentioned, we can conclude that character is U+2010 HYPHEN, though it
may be replaced by U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS. The standard allow the
replacement "in an environment where use is made of a character
repertoire based on ISO/IEC 646", which is standardese for "ASCII-based
contexts", but I think we can interpret the "based on" part liberally so
that the replacement is allowed whenever MINUS cannot be used (e.g.,
when a document's encoding is ISO 8859).
Thus, I think we can conclude that U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN is not
permitted by the ISO 8601 standard. It is compatibility equivalent to
U+2010, but this does not mean identity. Thus, to prevent line breaks in
an ISO 8601 date notation, you would need to use higher-level protocols,
such as markup (<nobr>...</nobr>) or markup with CSS, i.e.
<span class="date">2008-01-20</span>
with
.date { white-space: nowrap; }
This isn't really as surprising as it may sound. ISO 8601 notations are
primarily meant for use in data interchange and as coded representations
rather than normal text (plain or marked-up), though they surely have
their usefulness in a multilingual context where any other notation
would be ambiguous or non-neutral.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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