[tz] [PATCH] Revert recent pre-1970 changes.
Norbert Lindenberg
ietf at lindenbergsoftware.com
Mon Sep 2 23:15:24 UTC 2013
On Sep 2, 2013, at 11:55 , Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 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).
The second edition of the ECMAScript Internationalization API will use IANA time zone identifiers in its DateTimeFormat API, including the ability for applications to obtain the ID of the user's time zone. That edition is currently scheduled to be finalized by December 2014, and it will be some time more before applications can rely on this functionality to be generally available in browsers. For technical details, see
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=globalization:specification_drafts
Norbert
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