Re: HTML Time Zone proposal

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 5:52 PM, Shawn Steele
<Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> Part of a locale includes a region designation which is a geographic component, so i would say that it's harder to remove location from locale and purely define a locale as a language and void of geography.
>
> BCP-47 language tags fail some cases because you can't represent "Canadian English speaker in the United States".  It's being overloaded to represent things that aren't always a good fit.  I'd much prefer discrete language, region, Timezone, currency, etc fields.
>
> -Shawn
>
>

You can represent that as "en-CA-u-tz-PT" if you are in the Pacific
Time Zone, for example.

The location is irrelevant as the locale is not meant to be a location
designator, only a time zone designator which may include a location
for specificity.

The problem with discrete fields is that these can not be communicated
across HTTP and included as part of the Content-Language negotiation.

How are you supposed to know how to specify the time zone for a user
if you don't use the information in BCP-47?

With ip4 this could be done resolving a geolocation however with ipv6
this is becoming far more difficult and error prone. Another problem
with IP location is that this does not represent user preference, only
network properties, which isn't representative for people who are
traveling or otherwise want to register a preference outside of their
network location.

I don't think BCP-47 is being overloaded, what is the purpose of the
encoding if not to represent how information should be presented?

The encoding has all the flexibility of discrete fields, but combined
within a single encoding so it can be passed around and used as an
identifier.

Thanks,
Cameron

Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2015 14:00:35 UTC