RE: canonical names for timezones

Lenny,

Take Lord Howe Isl. in Australia The time zone is GMT+10:30.  DST is from
the last Sunday in October to the Last Sunday in March.  The DST adjustment
is 30 min.  In mid February it has the same time as Brisbane, in mid March
they are an hour apart and in mid April they are 30 min apart.

Three character abbreviations are no good either "MST" can represent Denver
time with DST, Phoenix without and Moscow Summer Time.

GMT +-12:00 does not work either Kiritimati is GMT+14:00.

The best solution is the use the Olsen zone names such as
"America/Los_Angeles".

What I last implemented was:

	POSIX Format

     ll [ _CC ] [ .MM ] [ @VV]

     ll = lang, CC = ctry, MM = charmap, VV = variant


	This format is extended to include time zone
     ll [ _CC ] [ .MM ] [ @VV] [ #zz]

     ll = lang, CC = ctry, MM = charmap, VV = variant, zz = time zone
	As well as variants, ICU and RFC1722 (RFC3066) formats
     ll [ _CC ] [ @VV] [ .MM ] [ #zz]
     ll [ _CC ] [_VV] [ .MM ] [ #zz]
     ll [ -CC ] [-VV] [ .MM ] [ #zz]

Currency I get from the locale information.

These time zones are supported by Java, ICU are other Unicode enabled
software.

Carl


> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-international-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Lenny Turetsky
> Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 10:50 AM
> To: W3intl (E-mail)
> Subject: canonical names for timezones
>
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> In building the external APIs to an application, we've discovered that we
> need to expose information about the user's localization configuration.
> We're pretty confident about how to communicate their locale (language,
> country, variant, in java.util.Locale style). We're confident about how to
> communicate currency (three letter ISO code).
>
> But how do we communicate their timezone? Is GMT offset sufficient? GMT
> offset + daylight savings time (on/off)?
> What would you suggest?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Lenny Turetsky
> Senior Member, Technical Staff
> i18n Man of Mystery
> salesforce.com
> The Landmark @ One Market
> Suite 300
> San Francisco, CA 94105 USA
> +1.415.901.5078
> lturetsky@salesforce.com <mailto:lturetsky@salesforce.com>
>

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 15:03:42 UTC