Some people who write in Wikipedia are interested in using
microformats to provide a machine-readable version of important dates
and times, in the hopes that future software will be better able to
mine data from articles. Dates and times in microformat purport to
conform to the ISO 8601 standard, but at least in the case of
Wikipedia, the people interested in implementing this sort of thing
don't have a clear understanding of time zones or the need to use
the Gregorian calendar. Upon re-reading the standard to see if some
of these items could be cleared up, I noticed that the standard has
an oversignt, in that it allows for dates and times before the
beginning of UTC but does not provide a way to specify a time zone
for these dates, because doing so requires UTC. In a standard that
is so careful to explain the meaning of every single character, this
seems like an error. Of course, people will go ahead and extend it
backward however they please, but strictly speaking, they are no
longer using ISO 8601, they are using their own private extension.

--- In ISO8601@yahoogroups.com, "johnmsteele" <johnmsteele@...> wrote:
> . . .
> What are you trying to do exactly and what time records are you
having
> trouble relating to UTC?