- From: Nicolas Froidure <froidure_nicolas@yahoo.fr>
- Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:51:33 +0100
- To: whatwg@lists.whatwg.org
Hi, In my opinion, it's normal that datetime and datetime-local have timezone and date/time don't. A date is timezone independant and time is more a duration then a time relative to a particular instant of a particular day. So making datetime having the behavior of datetime-local does not seem to be necessary for consistency. In any case, i think that we still need a way to define a datetime in a particular timezone since you cited one case in which it make sense. Another problem is the ouput value that seems inconsistent between datetime, datetime himself and datetime-local. By example in the Google Chrome/Firefox console : var f=document.createElement('input'); f.setAttribute('type','datetime'); f.value='2012-01-26 13:37:01'; console.log(f.value); // outputs 2012-01-26 13:37:01 f.value='2012-01-26T13:37:01Z'; console.log(f.value); // outputs 2012-01-26T13:37:01Z f.setAttribute('type','datetime-local'); console.log(f.value); // outputs 2012-01-26T13:37:01Z f.value='2012-01-26 13:37:01'; console.log(f.value); // outputs 2012-01-26 13:37:01 I think that whatever you decide for datetimes, it should always return a UTC value with only one format (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss or yyyy-mm-dd-Thh:mm:ssZ) to allow us to threat it the same way whether it is relative to the user timezone or not. On 12/11/2012 18:00, Mounir Lamouri wrote: > Hi, > > We've been working on implementing date and time input types attributes > at Mozilla this summer and we found out that 'datetime-local' and > 'datetime' have a quite odd behaviour. > > 'date' and 'time' are both timezone agnostic types: you just set a time > and date and we assume that it is relative to something. So, it seems > somewhat natural to assume that 'datetime' would be simply those types > added to each other. Instead of that, 'datetime' has a notion of > timezone and 'datetime-local' is the timezone agnostic type. > > In addition of being more intuitive, it seems that a huge majority of > date/time usage are timezone agnostics because, usually, the timezone is > implicit. For example, booking flight/train tickets. > There is however some use cases I can think of, like scheduling a > meeting, where, sometimes, you might want to mess with timezones. But > those are quite rare. > > Furthermore, there are currently two implementations for 'datetime' and > 'datetime-local' I can think of: > - Opera: 'datetime' is like 'datetime-local' except that there is a > greyed 'UTC' text next to the datetime picker; > - Chrome Android: 'datetime' is exactly like 'datetime-local'. > I haven't checked what is actually sent when the form is submitted by > those implementations. > > Last but not least, I have never seen any [good and simple] UI allowing > me to pick a date and time in a specific time zone. As far as I know, > there are no native UI for those things even on mobile where there are > UI for date and time pickers. > > As a conclusion, given the lack of good UI and good implementations, I > think we should change the behaviour of 'datetime' to match the > behaviour of 'datetime-local' so developers don't use the former and > falsely expect the behaviour of the later. > Also, I would suggest that we remove 'datetime-local' from the > specifications. If later if find out that we really need a date-time > picker that is not timezone agnostic, we could add something. For the > moment, given the state of the implementations and the very tiny use > cases that could solve, I think having this type would hurt more than help. > > Thanks, > -- > Mounir > >
Received on Tuesday, 13 November 2012 10:51:38 UTC