[kjhughes]

Dates and times are covered:

   4.3.  Time and Date Handling

   Protocols often contain data items that are designed to contain
   timestamps or time durations.  It is RECOMMENDED that all such data
   items be expressed as string values in ISO 8601 format, as specified
   in [RFC3339], with the additional restrictions that uppercase rather
   than lowercase letters be used, that the timezone be included not
   defaulted, and that optional trailing seconds be included even when
   their value is "00".  It is also RECOMMENDED that all data items
   containing time durations conform to the "duration" production in
   Appendix A of RFC 3339, with the same additional restrictions.

[btown]

For what it's worth, Salesforce even conforms to ISO 8601 internally. So, you know, if you're trying to develop agile tools for translating between JSON and Salesforce API records, then, um, things should just work...

takes a brief moment to contemplate the reality of his existence

The flip side of this is that if you're not using ISO 8601 in your JSON, you're doing worse than Salesforce. That's about as good of an incentive I can give this community to try to standardize their organizations around this standard!

[snuxoll]

I'm really surprised there's still a lot of people out there that don't use ISO 8601, I haven't used anything but for nearly a decade :/

[MichaelGG]

Twilio was the most shocking example. They use that braindead[1] "RFC" style that includes day of week and month name in English. I remember feeling it looked like the most ugly part of their API; no reason for this silliness. (Maybe they've changed it since I looked a few years ago).

1: It made sense in like the early 70s when people read and wrote all headers by hand. It's been stupid for a much longer time than it made sense though.

[pjungwir]

Oh that's great! It looks like the HTML version of his link doesn't have any subsections under section 4:

http://rfc7159.net/rfc7159

but the plaintext version does:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7493.txt

Maybe the document is still in flux and the text version represents a later addition?

EDIT: Oops, my first link is to the original JSON spec. Sorry for the confusion!

[KaiserPro]

but its only "recommended" which means it can not adhere to this, and still be compliant. It seems a bit pointless to make a new spec and not enforce one of the main things that trip people up.