Re: [ddlm-group] Minor change to DateTime DDLm type

Dear DDLm group,

The DateTime option for DDLm `_type.contents` encapsulates a date and time according to RFC3339, so something like 1996-12-19T16:39:57-08:00

It seems that sometimes a Date is not enough, but a full time including seconds is too much. CIFs in the wild missing seconds have been encountered by the COD, see https://projects.ibt.lt/repositories/issues/1713. This strictly violates the expected syntax.

The tidiest solution would be to allow minutes and seconds, or just seconds, to be dropped from the timestamp. This would be a slight expansion of the syntax of DateTime in the DDLm `_type.contents` data name, which may have ramifications for software that has been written to expect a full DateTime.

Defining a new type, e.g. `PartialDateTime`, doesn't actually improve the situation because dictionary definitions wanting to adopt the more liberal timestamp would also have to be changed. Defining a new type only makes sense if we are happy to add new definitions to the dictionaries to supersede those that use the old type.

Would this group endorse expanding the acceptable syntaxes of DateTime? See also Github discussion at https://github.com/COMCIFS/cif_core/issues/523.

thanks,

James.

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