Editing ISO 8601 (section)

==General principles==
*Date and time values are ordered from the largest to smallest unit of time: year, month (or week), day, hour, minute, second, and fraction of second. The [[lexicographical order]] of the representation thus corresponds to chronological order, except for date representations involving negative years or time offset. This allows dates to be naturally [[sorting|sorted]] by, for example, file systems.
*Each date and time value has a fixed number of digits that must be padded with [[leading zero]]s.
*Representations can be done in one of two formats{{spaced ndash}}a ''basic format'' with a minimal number of separators or an ''extended format'' with separators added to enhance human readability.<ref name="isofaqtnd">ISO: "[http://www.iso.org/iso/iso8601 ISO 8601 — Date and time format]". {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130308153102/http://www.iso.org/iso/iso8601 |date=2013-03-08 }}.</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last1=Wolf |first1=Misha |last2=Wicksteed |first2=Charles |date=15 September 1997 |title=Date and Time Formats |url=https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210510231523/https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime |archive-date=10 May 2021 |access-date=11 May 2021 |website=[[w3.org|W3C]]}}</ref> The standard notes that "The basic format should be avoided in [[plain text]]."<ref>ISO 8601:2004 section 2.3.3 basic format</ref> The separator used between date values (year, month, week, and day) is the [[hyphen]], while the [[Colon (punctuation)|colon]] is used as the separator between time values (hours, minutes, and seconds).<!--dead link: [http://lists.ebxml.org/archives/ebxml-core/200104/pdf00005.pdf]--> For example, the 6th day of the 1st month of the year 2009 may be written as {{nowrap|"2009-01-06"}} in the extended format or as "20090106" in the basic format without ambiguity.
*{{anchor|Reduced precision}} For reduced [[precision and accuracy|precision]],<ref name="AccuracyVsPrecision">Earlier versions of ISO&nbsp;8601 used the word ''accuracy'', not ''precision'', in the relevant section, e.g: 2.3.7 representation with reduced accuracy. This was corrected in ISO&nbsp;8601-1:2019.</ref> any number of values may be dropped from any of the date and time representations, but in the order from the least to the most significant. For example, "2004-05" is a valid ISO&nbsp;8601 date, which indicates May (the fifth month) 2004. This format will never represent the 5th day of an unspecified month in 2004, nor will it represent a time-span extending from 2004 into 2005.
*If necessary for a particular application, the standard supports the addition of a [[Decimal fractions|decimal fraction]] to the smallest time value in the representation.