[Bug 17856] i18n-ISSUE-89: Time zones and local dates and times

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17856

--- Comment #4 from Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> ---
(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to bug 16960 comment #3)
> > One way of addressing it would be to define it in terms of a floating time
> > value, although floating times are usually either a date (with no
> > hour/minute/second value) representing an event such as a birthdate that is
> > not ties to a specific time zone or to a time (with no day/month/year) which
> > can be interpreted as a local wall time in any time zone (such as the time
> > of day to observe the DST transition), rather than a combination of both.
> 
> Renaming the types at this time is something we could do, but only if the
> new name is especially compelling and the old name especially problematic.

The use of the therm "floating time" seems compelling to me. It's not even
something that has to be defined in the HTML spec, since it's defined here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/NOTE-timezone-20110705/#floating and also here:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt and seems a commonly used term in coding,
eg.
http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/DateTime-TimeZone-1.60/lib/DateTime/TimeZone/Floating.pm
and applications, eg.
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Understanding_iCal_Time_Zones.

It's more concrete than "local date and time", because the determination of
"local" implies a point of reference. Thus, we'd need to specify whether it's
with reference to the local time zone of the browser - or the local time zone
of the server or some other reference point. We, in fact, want the opposite: we
want something that has no time zone and no point of reference. 

> It's not clear to me that either of these are true (e.g. see the caveats in
> the paragraph above, and note that the definition of "floating" in the
> paragraph above does in fact use the term "local" — they're not _that_
> different really).

It depends on when the mapping to a wall-clock time happens. A "local date and
time" implies that the mapping happens at the time of input/selection in the
browser. After that, the time zone is fixed. In contrast, a "floating time"
implies that there is no time zone and it's always mapped at the time of
display, which is more accurate.

> Certainly there are use cases for type=local-datetime
> that aren't strictly about "local" values, but there are many that are. A
> perfect name is difficult to find here.

"floating" works for me and was also what you used in #c1 to explain what
'local dates and times' means.

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Received on Monday, 29 July 2013 22:23:57 UTC