Timezone requirement on date

Hey there,

I was looking at the spec and there seems to be inconsistency in terms of how the timezone is required or not.

Under this page: http://hl7.org/fhir/search.html#date

It says: “and you SHOULD provide a time zone if the time part is present.”

However, under this page: http://hl7.org/fhir/datatypes.html#datetime

It says: “If hours and minutes are specified, a time zone SHALL be populated.”

Should those be consistent (and if so, is it SHALL or SHOULD?) or should they be handled differently as one applies specifically to the input string on search parameter value and one applies to data stored within the JSON document?

Thanks!

They are not inconsistent - there’s valid reasons to make the search string have a lower requirement than the data string