RE: [Alarm] respectTimezone

Hi,

Yes, I agree with Jonas' statement that a lot of people associate this API with alarm clocks.
For these people, having "respectTimezone" as default value would indeed be confusing.

It is probably safer to keep this argument mandatory as the difference in behavior is important. IMHO, the developer is more likely to choose the right behavior if the argument is mandatory.

Kr,
Christophe Dumez.
________________________________________
From: Jonas Sicking [jonas@sicking.cc]
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2013 07:36
To: Marcos Caceres
Cc: public-sysapps@w3.org
Subject: Re: [Alarm] respectTimezone

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Marcos Caceres
<marcosscaceres@gmail.com> wrote:
> The spec says:
>> > The second argument respectTimezone can be either "respectTimezone" or "ignoreTimezone" to
>
> This seems to be a boolean in disguise:) Also, why is this a required argument? In most cases, you want to "respectTimezone", right?

A calendar app would likely use "respectTimezone", while an alarm
clock app would likely use "ignoreTimezone". I'm not sure which is
more common, but neither behavior seem obvious enough that it makes a
good default.

For example, what time do you think an alarm should go off if a page does:

alarms.add(new Date(2013, 2, 20, 10, 0, 0))

if the user changes timezone the day before the alarm goes off? Should
it go off at 10am or some other time?

Default values are good when the lack of the argument clearly
indicates a particular behavior. But I don't think either behavior
here is particularly intuitive or clear when left unspecified. A good
case in point is that most people think when looking at an alarm API
is alarm clocks, and they generally want the "ignoreTimezone"
behavior, which you seem to think the default should not be?

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 15 February 2013 07:15:12 UTC