builtins: Why is the 'Z' prefix disallowed for the Date.prototype.toISOString method?

[lth]

A thread on es4-discuss uncovered the fact that the toISOString proposal has a couple of bugs:

• The time zone of the serialized time is unspecified in the proposal, it should probably be UTC. Any reason why not?
• Being UTC, the Z suffix should be used but the proposal explicitly disallows that. Why?

The ISO reference page we use does not contain any ban on using "Z" for serialization. It could be a backwards compatibility issue: current parsers would be able to deal with a time zone, most likely, but might not deal with "Z".

[lth]

It is in fact not likely that the "Z" prohibition is there to help current parsers, since the time stamp will contain a fractions-of-a-second part that will probably confuse current parsers just as much. This is the current output of toISOString():

2007-06-02T17:42:30.718+00:00

I note the month and day are wrong, so there are some bugs here, but you get the idea :-P

[lth]

Resolved: Z is OK.