Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!nosc!logicon.com!Makey From: Makey@Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey) Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh Subject: Re: Timezone interpretation problem Message-ID: <757@logicon.com> Date: 22 Aug 90 22:02:53 GMT References: <123900@pyramid.pyramid.com> <9008201520.AA24431@somewhere> Organization: Logicon, Inc., San Diego, California Lines: 27 In article ahl@technix.oz.au (Tony Landells) wrote: >the problem will exist any time you go between countries with different >ideas of whether daylight savings is active or not. The problem isn't limited to international mail. Not all parts of the United States observe daylight time so, for example, an offset in today's date of -0700 would indicate Pacific Daylight Time if it came from California, but if it came from Arizona the same offset would indicate Mountain Standard Time. A good way to eliminate all ambiguity would be for the sender to add a parenthesis-delimited comment to the RFC 822 Date: header, such as: Date: Wed, 22 Aug 90 15:01:57 -0700 (PDT) This provides an unambiguous, machine-parsable offset from GMT, plus a human-readable name for the time zone. There is no point in a recipient trying to second-guess the meaning of an offset or a time zone name; determining the daylight time rules for one's own location is often difficult enough without having to worry about the rest of the world. :: Jeff Makey Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department Disclaimer: All opinions are strictly those of the author. Internet: Makey@Logicon.COM UUCP: {nosc,ucsd}!logicon.com!Makey