- From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
- Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2014 13:48:11 -0400
- To: "Phillips, Addison" <addison@lab126.com>
- Cc: www International <www-international@w3.org>
Phillips, Addison scripsit: > The Internationalization WG has been working on addressing a > long-standing gap in HTML time and date values, which is the lack of > accurate/complete time zone identifiers. Time values can contain the UTC > (GMT) offset, which allows most "timestamps" to be complete. However, > some situations call for the additional information conveyed by the > actual time zone rules. See [1] for examples. I believe the use cases should be strengthened by pointing out explicitly that future dates cannot be correctly represented by an offset alone, as noted in [1] section 4.3. This can have legal consequences. Option contracts, for example, have their expiry times given as such-and-such a date, "5 PM New York time" (or "London time"), which protects buyers against the vagaries of time zone changes: what is meant is, whatever is 5 PM on that day in the time zone including New York or London. Time zones are meaningful for month and week values as well as precise dates: just when April 2005 begins and ends, for example, depends on the time zone. > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/timezone/ -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org Real FORTRAN programmers can program FORTRAN in any language. --Ed Post
Received on Friday, 8 August 2014 17:48:36 UTC