Hi, I must admit that I have not followed the discussion the last month, so I may have missed something. The current draft at http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/spec.html looks better than a few month ago, thanks to all who contributed in improving the planned standard. However, in the current form the draft is just a list of examples with some description. Some of us already asked for a formal specification in Backus-Naur-Form or about an implementation, but it looks like the current standardization process is going on detached from technical feasability (?). I fear that without a formal specification and some implementation, the format will end up as one-way data hole or as incomplete boilerplate of faulty applications. I started to write a parser, based on a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) - the most difficult part seem to be the gaps and inconsistencies in the current draft. Maybe this project is of use for anyone interested to dig deeper: https://github.com/nichtich/lua-edtf I stopped the work after a got the basic framework because my main interest is not EDTF. If you don't like Lua or PEG, you can also use another formalism, but EDTF needs a formal definition or you cannot call it a "standard" or "specification" at all. Jakob Voss -- Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) Digitale Bibliothek - Jakob Voß Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1 37073 Goettingen - Germany +49 (0)551 39-10242 http://www.gbv.de [log in to unmask]