From: "Chris Sells" <csells@sellsbrothers.com> Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 15:06:21 -0700 XML would allow the data to be used without the software, making it instantly available for all the platforms not supported today Yes, they could read the XML data, but these platforms can read the text data now. Merely XMLizing the data won't make it much more available for time calculations, which is the goal here. A more appropriate new format would be MIME text/calendar, which specifies a VTIMEZONE calendar component. Please see: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/calsch-charter.html http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt (section 4.6.5) Doug Royer wrote in February that he was working on a project to convert the tz database to VTIMEZONE format, and I believe he's still working on it. As I understand it he also advocated that IANA be in charge of the tz database, but I don't know what's come of that part of his proposal.
From: Eric Ulevik [mailto:eau@ozemail.com.au] * right now, there are no good editors for creating XML
Not true. Win32 has about half a dozen good ones. I don't use Win32, and I don't know of any free, portable XML editor (unless you count Emacs :-).