You probably have seen ISO 8601 timestamps with fractional seconds, such as this one:
% date --iso-8601=ns
2023-04-20T18:45:11,094052607+02:00
However, many people don’t know ISO 8601 also allows for fractional minutes and hours!
According to the standard, these timestamps are equivalent (rounded to a second):
2023-04-20T18:45:11
2023-04-20T18:45,18333
2023-04-20T18,75305
Note that in contrast to common scientific usage, the decimal part is recommended to be separated by a comma and not a full stop, although the latter is permitted too.
However, the standard does not specify the obvious next generalization, that is, allowing fractional days. I thus propose to extend ISO 8601 in the following way, which does not change the meaning of valid existing representations:
The local time representation (after the optional time designator) may consist of only a decimal fraction, which then is interpreted as a multiple of 24 hours.
Thus, we can write the above timestamp also like this:
2023-04-20T,78137
2023-04-20,78137
Now, why would one want this? Essentially, there are three reasons:
First, it’s cute and an obvious extension of the existing format.
Second, it allows representing times of the French Republican Calendar in a natural way, which uses a decimal system as well: in this calendar, the day is divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes and 100 seconds each. Thus, the digits align directly to a decimal fraction of the whole day. The above timestamp is then (computed using fdate):
Primidi, 1 Floréal CCXXXI (231) 7:81:37
Note that we use local time here, not Paris time. If you insist on using Paris solar time, you need to offset 9 ISO minutes and 21 ISO seconds, which can be approximated as
2023-04-20T,77350+0009
Note that ISO 8601 does not allow for specifying offsets from UTC in seconds (another obvious oversight).
Finally, the mechanism also supports the use of Swatch Internet Time, a late 90s decimal time system. Here, the day is divided into 1000 beats, and the offset is fixed UTC+1 (for the Swatch headquarters in Biel):
2023-04-20T,739+0100
This is a bit more verbose than @739 but at least it’s an
international standard already!
NP: Tristan Brusch feat. Annett Louisan—Kein Problem