title: Is there a standard date/time format that can be passed on a URL?
body: <p>Looking at the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.datetimeformatinfo.aspx" rel="noreferrer">DateTimeFormatInfo</a> documentation, it appears that all the standard formats have colons in them, which makes passing them on a url unpleasant/impossible.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a standardized format for passing a datetime on a url, preferably one that can be automatically parsed by .NET?</p>
  
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  <p><strong>Update:</strong> A little clarification</p>
  
  <p>The consumer of this data is going to be web service of some kind - it'll either be a simple HTTP GET with this value in the querystring, or it'll be REST with the value in the url somewhere.</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Combined_date_and_time_representations" rel="noreferrer">ISO 8601</a> governs date/time formatting, and according to the wiki article, using <code>ToString("yyyyMMddTHHmmssZ")</code> should be standards-compliant at least. Unfortunately, it doesn't get picked up automatically by ASP.NET MVC (haven't tried anything else yet). For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC won't automatically convert ticks to a datetime either, which surprised me.</p>