Re: Call for comments: HTML5.x time zone proposal [I18N-ACTION-327]

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