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From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Is anyone interested in putting local time in the "Date:" header?
Message-ID: <2184@coconut.bbn.com>
Date: 29 Nov 89 01:53:41 GMT
References: <14749@well.UUCP>
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation
Lines: 26

In <14749@well.UUCP> Jef Poskanzer <jef@well.sf.ca.us> writes:
> it seems to me that it
>would be better if the date were in the local time at the originating
>machine.
I disagree.  At least with dates in GMT, I just have to learn one
simple rule -- subtract five hours to get the "real" time.  I need
to look at a globe whenever someone mentions the international date
line.  Dealing with "X" foreign times is much too complicated.

What do you think is the benefit?

>1) It's easy to go from local times to GMT, but it's impossible to go
>from GMT to the appropriate local time since you don't know which one
>is appropriate.  Thus if people started posting in local time but someone
>absolutely had to see GMT, he could easily modify his newsreaders to
>parse the date field and convert.
This seems self-contradictory.  You can't do GMT->foreign local
because you don't know the rules, but you can do foreign local->GMT?
I don't think time converstions work that way.  Am I just confused?

I think the thing that makes the most sense is to display dates in
local time at the reading machine.
	/r$
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