- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:34:31 -0800
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: WHAT Working Group <whatwg@whatwg.org>
On Jan 8, 2013 1:47 AM, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch> wrote: > On Tue, 27 Nov 2012, Mikko Rantalainen wrote: > > Ian Hickson, 2012-11-22 07:15 (Europe/Helsinki): > > > On Wed, 21 Nov 2012, Mounir Lamouri wrote: > > >> Then, maybe a better naming could be "datetime-utc"? > > > > > > I think that would mislead authors into thinking that the UI that > > > users will see is one that asks for a UTC time. That kind of UI is the > > > worst UI for this kind of feature, so that would be misleading. > > > > I'd suggest "datetime-absolute" because the other variant is "floating" > > or "relative" (to local politically decided time which may vary > > depending on future political decisions). > > We could rename "datetime" to "datetime-absolute" and leave > "datetime-local" as named, but I'm not really convinced that's much better > than what we have now. I think it more common for people to interact mainly with people in their own timezone. I.e. most time when talking about dates and times people don't me nation what timezone is involved and rely on contest to provide that information. This applies both professionally, since most people work at single-timezone companies, or at least single-timezone departments, as well as privately, since most people interact with friends and family mainly in the same timezone. So in most contexts when people think about a point in time, they do so for a specific timezone. When that is not the case, this is something that people are aware of. When I interact with friends/family/coworkers where the timezone is not obvious this is quite clear. And in these cases I'm aware that I need to specify timezone. I think that the same applies to developers. So I would imagine that when a developer sees "datetime" that does not include a timezone. Likewise, when a developer wants to ask the user for a point in time which does include a timezone, that they would remember to ask for that explicitly. Additionally, in many cases even when timezones are involved do UIs not ask for the timezone as part of the date/time picker. When looking for airplane tickets the timezone is assumed to be that of the departing location when talking about departing time, and that of the arrival destination when talking about arriving time. When renting a car, the same thing applies, even if the car is picked up and returned in different timezones. Even the calendar app that's on my device (the built-in calendar app for Android 4.2) does not ask for timezone as part of the date/time picker. Instead a separate control is used where the user can choose what timezone the separately entered date/time is. This makes a lot of sense since timezones are easy to forget about and so having explicit and separate UI makes things more unlikely that the user will forget to enter the information. This is actually required for repeating events since it's important to know which timezone the user picked. I.e. there are two values entered by the user: the date/time and the timezone. So first off I'm not convinced that the common case for date/time entry will include entering a timezone. That might be the case in the technology industry, but is likely not elsewhere. Second, I'm not convinced that even if the common case includes timezone entry, that this means that the intuitive behavior for a "datetime" input type is to include UI for timezone entry. Third, I think that even in many cases where timezones are involved, that the better UI is to have timezone entry separate from from the date/time picker. I'm not advocating that having a timezone aware date/time picker is a bad idea. But I don't think it should be the "default" behavior. It might not even make it into the 80% set of use cases. So at least we should make "datetime" refer to a timezone-agnostic picker. And then use "datetime-global" or "datetime-absolute" or some such as a timezone aware picker. / Jonas
Received on Tuesday, 15 January 2013 01:35:19 UTC