Re: [Comment on WS-I18N WD]

Dan Chiba wrote:

>   2. Timezone (Olson ID or RFC 822 zone offset)
[...]
> Is this a reasonable list of the element items now?

I'm not sure about "RFC 822 zone offset", that is
for my European eyes rather US-centric, and not what
I'd expect in a memo claiming to be about I18N.  The
draft says:

| Note that RFC 822 zone offsets are not complete
| time zone identifiers

OTOH that is unfair, RFC 822 can do any offset down
to minutes.  But this was later improved in 2822upd
(soon to be approved) among others:

| zone  =  (FWS ( "+" / "-" ) 4DIGIT) / obs-zone

That is far better, the cruft is in <obs-zone>, and
you could import 2822upd <zone> excl. <obs-zone>.

The prose is also better, e.g., it specifies -0000,
and it notes that the last two digits are limited
to 00..59, for the details compare

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-resnick-2822upd-06#section-3.3

There is also RFC 3339 specifying the "Internet
Date/Time format" (a no-nonsense subset or "profile"
of ISO 8601:2000).  RFC 3339 specifies:

| time-hour       = 2DIGIT  ; 00-23
| time-minute     = 2DIGIT  ; 00-59
[...]
| time-numoffset  = ("+" / "-") time-hour ":" time-minute
| time-offset     = "Z" / time-numoffset

You would not want the colon, because RFC (2)822(upd)
doesn't have it, but you might want the "Z", a part of
<obs-zone> in 2822upd.  Odd, the IETF USEFOR WG ended
up with adopting a 2822 <zone> excl. <obs-zone>, but
keeping one obsolete identifier, in that case it was
"UT", not "Z" (meaning the same thing, UTC).  The 
"UT" was for NetNews backward compatibility, nothing
you need to worry about. 

 Frank

Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 01:38:43 UTC