[tz] [PATCH] Revert recent pre-1970 changes.

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Mon Sep 2 18:55:15 UTC 2013


On Sep 2, 2013, at 11:39 AM, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:

> The current 'html' standards only allow for the return of the current time offset between the local time at the site of the browser and UTC. This laughingly called the timezone Offset, but lacks that important piece of information to identify which timezone. i.e. it has no information on the daylight saving information.

OK, so you really *did* mean "browser" in the sense of "Web browser".

That's an issue for browser writers and Web standardizers; the tzdb provides tzids, whether said browser writers and Web standardizers choose to use them is up to them, not up to us (and, to a large degree, it's up to a large organization located in Redmond, Washington, USA, as they have an OS with a somewhat significant market share in the notebook, desktop, and server market, and *don't* use the tzdb for time zone/DST information, and thus any browser that runs on said OS would have to handle tzids itself rather than using OS code to do so).

> It was the problems of displaying a calendar for international web based events without a client logging in which first got me involved with the tz database ... you can't display that calendar in 'local time' until the client provides their timezone manually.

Do it as much like OS X as possible, unless you can do it even better (where exposing users to the details of the tzdb to a greater degree than does the OS X GUI counts as "worse", not "better").


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