Inconsistant Date Parsing With Missing Timezone

In doing some testing I've found inconsistant behavior between browsers with the following javascript new Date('2013-09-10T08:00:00').toString() In IE and Firefox the result is '

Solution 1:

Standards clash. ISO 8601 states that:

If no UTC relation information is given with a time representation, the time is assumed to be in local time.

ECMA says:

The value of an absent time zone offset is “Z”.

Mozilla devs think that ISO takes precedence, Chrome folks seem to disagree.

The current draft of ES6 says (under 20.3.1.15):

If the time zone offset is absent, the date-time is interpreted as a local time.

so Mozilla's implementation is (will be) correct.

Solution 2:

There are several questions on stackoverflow.com that address this issue. I gave a rather thorough explanation here if anyone reading this is interested in the browser-to-browser details.

The bottom line though is, for now at least, you should either avoid the ISO 8601 format all together or ALWAYS include a timezone specifier when using it. And, never use the 'YYYY-MM-dd' format because it gets interpreted as a short version of ISO 8601 without a time zone specifier.