[Bug 7678] time zones and leap seconds

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7678





--- Comment #3 from Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org>  2009-09-28 17:12:09 ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> respect to the last paragraph of the issue description note only that the spec
> describes the offset as an offset from UTC, not from Posix time_t.  I hope
> rather than affirm that this means no adjustment to the text is necessary in
> order for the behavior of XSD types to be well defined in the event that the
> scenario described in the issue description comes to pass.

There is no telling what the ITU-R will decide, but there is another possible
scenario.  The laws of some countries specify mean solar time, and it is
possible that their reaction to a UTC without leap seconds would be to add
subsequent leap seconds into the zone offset for their own jurisdiction.  Again
whereas the POSIX specification currently can handle this, in this case the XML
Schema specification would fail to represent the time zone of any such
countries because their zone offsets would no longer be integer minutes.

The indications from the status quo are that the UK, Denmark, and China all
consider mean solar time more important than atomic time.  The long history of
time scales shows that any scale controlled by someone else is subject to
change its characteristics at their whim.  It is very hard to future-proof a
standard against this, but allowing zone offsets of seconds would both match
the capabilities of POSIX and handle the most plausible zone scenarios.


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Received on Monday, 28 September 2009 17:12:18 UTC