Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!uflorida!mephisto!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Is anyone interested in putting local time in the "Date:" header? Message-ID: <1989Nov30.015638.18283@NCoast.ORG> Date: 30 Nov 89 01:56:38 GMT References: <14749@well.UUCP> <2184@coconut.bbn.com> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: news.software.b Organization: North Coast Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, OH Lines: 30 As quoted from <2184@coconut.bbn.com> by rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz): +--------------- | In <14749@well.UUCP> Jef Poskanzer writes: | >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? +--------------- The local posting time contains the timezone, which is sufficient information to compute GMT. A GMT posting time contains *no* local timezone information, so you have to try to infer the timezone from the poster's location... assuming you can get *that* information. However, I agree that there is little incentive aside from the somewhat frivolous desire to attempt to graph the (in-)coherence of a posting against the poster's local time. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery allbery@NCoast.ORG, BALLBERY (MCI Mail), ALLBERY (Delphi) uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu bsa@telotech.uucp *(comp.sources.misc mail to comp-sources-misc[-request]@backbone.site, please)* *Third party vote-collection service: send mail to allbery@uunet.uu.net (ONLY)* expnet.all: Experiments in *net management and organization. Mail me for info.