Re: [Task Scheduler] Can we really remove TimezoneDirective argument?

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013, at 1:31, Christophe Dumez wrote:
> I remember I already raised this issue during the Toronto F2F when it was
> first suggested we remove timezone support.
> Mounir responded that the application would have to listen for timezone
> change events to support such use cases:
> http://www.w3.org/2013/08/27-sysapps-minutes.html#item05 (You can search
> for " we can't do an alarm clock application")
> 
> So I would like to hear Mounir's feedback on this issue. I don't think we
> have any API to listen for timezone changes yet,
> do we? (and time changes due to DST). Even then, this will be quite some
> work on application side

Indeed, I said that we could simply listen to a timezone change event
but what I said should be put in the context of the discussion we had:
we did not find a good way to handle the timezone situation for that
API. As far as I remember and according to the logs, the main reason why
we decided to remove this attribute is that it seemed better to not have
it instead of having it in its current form.

Any alternative would be welcome.

> Overall, the task scheduler API is so simple (no recurrence, no timezone
> support) that I think it will require a lot of work
> on application side to support use cases such as the ones for alarm
> clocks and calendars. While I like the fact that the
> API is simple, I worry we are not doing a good enough job covering these
> more complex use cases.

This API might be hard to use for an alarm clock application but it is a
fairly limited use case. I can't actually think of any other kind of
applications that would set tz-agnostic alarms. Also, given that most
calendars events can be defined by an UTC time, I think using this API
for a calendar application should be mostly fine.

Cheers,
--
Mounir

Received on Monday, 18 November 2013 14:10:19 UTC