Date: Thu, 02 Jan 1997 16:45:07 -0500 From: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu ("Markus G. Kuhn")
Section 4.2
When the local offset is unknown, the offset "-00:00" MAY be used to indicate that the time is in UTC and the local offset is unknown.
This is worded a little confusingly -- could you please clarify? ....
On board a plane, in orbit, in a submarine, in any mobile device that receives time only by GPS or NTP, in my labtop that I carry with me during my next south pole tour, ... I should have stated my question more clearly. In some cases, local time may be defined but not known (e.g. a UTC-based timepiece at an unknown location); in other cases, local time itself may be undefined (an extreme example of this is the North Pole; there are other, more common, examples, e.g. aircraft flying over most of the Pacific, where there is no established convention for time zone boundaries or for whether daylight saving applies). I couldn't tell which case was intended from the original wording; I now see from other people's responses that the former was undoubtedly intended but it might be helpful to clarify the wording here. While we're on the subject, I think `-00:00' is a kludge and should be removed. How about the following convention instead? `Z' means the time is in UTC and the local UTC offset is unknown or undefined. `+00' means the time is in UTC and the local UTC offset is 0. This conveys the same information as the convention proposed in section 4.2 of draft-newman-datetime-00.txt, but it's easier to explain and is more consistent.