Markus G. Kuhn wrote:
I do not have very strong feelings about the optionality of the minute offset, but my arguments for it are:
- only *very* few countries use it today and time zones are so often redefined that there is some good hope that the 30-min offset zones will disappear in 2020 or so. Then, we would not carry around any more the obsolete minute fields in our headers.
- I personally think that the hour only offset is much more readable and that the additional implementation effort (one single "if" in my sample code) is so trivial that it is really not worth any discussion.
I would make minute offsets mandatory, because we are discussing not only contemporary but historical time zone data, when minute offsets were more common. Also IMHO minute offsets are not necessarily a Bad Thing; a small country without any of its territory going through an hourly meridian but with territory going through a minute offset might be better served by the minute offset zone; Portugal and Ireland, for example, fit GMT-0:30 closer than GMT or GMT-1. What I would favor is putting a colon in between hours and minutes, for readability; i.e. the time in Darwin, Australia is easier to read as GMT or UT+09:30 than as +0930. My $0.02 worth...
Chris Carrier wrote:
Markus G. Kuhn wrote:
I do not have very strong feelings about the optionality of the minute offset, but my arguments for it are:
- only *very* few countries use it today and time zones are so often redefined that there is some good hope that the 30-min offset zones will disappear in 2020 or so.
I would make minute offsets mandatory, because we are discussing not only contemporary but historical time zone data, when minute offsets were more common.
If you consider this as an option, you should add the seconds offset! Until 1978 (?) for some applications, Paris time was in official use; and it's defined as GMT+00:09:21 (I don't know what happen with the 10 leap seconds on 1972-01-01 ;-). On the other side, I don't consider it's worth the value, if you want MHO.
Also IMHO minute offsets are not necessarily a Bad Thing; a small country without any of its territory going through an hourly meridian but with territory going through a minute offset might be better served by the minute offset zone; Portugal and Ireland, for example, fit GMT-0:30 closer than GMT or GMT-1.
I won't count India as a small country :-), but I understand this is the very reason for this country to be in a half-hour offset (I think the other options is to have two time zones, clearly a bad thing, or advantaging a side of the country instead of the other...) Antoine
Chris Carrier wrote:
I would make minute offsets mandatory, because we are discussing not only contemporary but historical time zone data, when minute offsets were more common.
If you consider this as an option, you should add the seconds offset!
Until 1978 (?) for some applications, Paris time was in official use; and it's defined as GMT+00:09:21 (I don't know what happen with the 10 leap seconds on 1972-01-01 ;-).
Or Saudi Arabia even now.
On the other side, I don't consider it's worth the value, if you want MHO.
Agreed. Rounding off the timezone offset to the nearest minute should be fine; applications which need better precision than this will probably use Zulu time (UTC) anyway. For what it's worth: My opinion on the "minutes in the zone offset" question is to make them manditory in this proposed profile. Stylistically I also like the idea of having a ":" between the hours and minutes, but I won't miss it if it's not there. I feel that having seconds (and fractions thereof) in the timezone offset to be excessive. --Ken Pizzini
participants (3)
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Antoine Leca -
Chris Carrier -
Ken Pizzini