Fate of Io: Time formatting suggestion

Time formatting suggestion

2005/10/15 07:16:18 PDT by Davy boy2000b [0/13]

There are people in this project from all over the world, which makes meeting times difficult to work out for some. I have an idea. A new tag?

[19:30]

Now for me that's GMT, but it would be different to somebody who would be living in PDT. That would be GMT-6.

If somebody from GMT was to view this page, it would simply show 19:30, but say if they're in PDT then the page would show 13:30.

Not sure exactly how this would be implemented using Evlan, but as a PHP programmer, I could do this by simply having all members set a time zone in thier profile (or even one be automatically set every time they log in using pre-set variables within the language?) and the page with the tag would simply recall the info in the member's profile and make the necessary changes.

Let me know if I don't make sense.

2005/10/15 09:27:23 PDT by Temporal [manager]

To let users choose their time zone server-side would require programming the server not just with the knowledge of all time zones (there are more than 24 of them, you know), but also knowledge of every daylight saving time algorithm. DST algorithms tend to be complicated ("2AM on the first Sunday of April") and often arbitrary (e.g. one year Isreal decided to do DST a week later for religious reasons). This isn't really practical...

A much better alternative would be to use Javascript to produce timestamps. Then they'd be in whatever time zone the user's system uses, without the user having to set anything. I actually was doing this at one point, but I changed my mind because it actually caused some confusion. People don't expect a web page to automatically know their time zone, so they'll probably spend some time trying to figure out what time zone the site is using (unfortunately, Javascript can't produce a 3-letter time zone identifier). Once they do figure it out, they will tend to assume that the whole web site is actually running on their own time, and will assume that if they say "meet at 3:00", everyone will know what time zone they mean. In the end I decided that appending PST/PDT to the time was the least ambiguous solution.