Re: Time zones in base data schema

Dear Chris, thanks for your feedback on the P3P specification.

> 1. You specify only "text" as the type for the date.timezone field,
> whereas this could be specified more precisely (like country code is).
This is not the intent of the specification, and I'm sorry if you were
mislead to assume there's no type constraint. After the date. table
there is the precisation
> All the fields in the date. type must be in the same format as those
> in the most informative profile of the time standard ISO8601.
(btw, because of your feedback I've changed "are" from the previous 
version of the spec into "must", to make this clearer).
So, in essence it's a matter of taste whether to introduce a new type
(like for Country), or using a more general type and specify a 
constraint on it. The current choice reflects the fact that eight 
types in date. now are compactly referenced to ISO8601, while making 
the type explicit would mean you've to create eight subtypes
corresponding to ISO8601. Anyway, no semantic difference.

> 2. Lots of sites request the user's timezone, yet you don't have that
> represented as part of your user. schema, other than perhaps
> accidentally as a field in the birthday element.
The timezone information can be inferred from user.home and/or
user.business (from various fields, either city, or stateprov, or 
postalcode etc). In general, we have tried to keep the base data set
to a minimum, avoiding fields that are not of common use (after all,
new data schemas can be created too). However, if you feel that the 
ability to *directly* request a timezone can be of significant impact
for many of today's sites, we'd appreciate some examples and use cases that
could justify the introduction of a new timezone field.

Again, thanks for your precious feedback, and feel free to reply with 
further questions and clarifications, until every doubt/problem you
have is completely solved.

All the best,
-Massimo


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Received on Thursday, 24 February 2000 12:58:37 UTC