[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]
Subject: Re: [office] Date and Timezone: draft text
> So who makes the first move to improve things? > Wait for Excel? No, nor has anyone claimed that. All that's needed is that SOMEONE demonstrate a reference model. ANYONE can take an existing open source software implementation, improve on it, and demonstrate that the approach works. It need not be an "official" release by the project, though of course that would add weight. If there's a demonstrated way to add that functionality, and it gains rough consensus, then of course it's in and I'd be delighted. But humility in standards development is _critical_. There is a very, very long list of "standards" that failed because the committee wrote a standard or added an "obvious little extension" in it, and THEN (after ratification) someone tried to implement it. The universal result has been that it couldn't be implemented, or at least not in a way anyone wanted. Standards co-developed with implementations is, in my view, the best approach. At the least, no specification should be accepted until there is at least one demonstration of its effectiveness (e.g., a reference implementation), and we are trying to wrap up OpenFormula 1.0. I know timezones look easy, but adding this capability is not as trivial as it appears. The date and datetime representations of spreadsheets, which users have found adequate for decades, do not easily support them. Numbers don't include a time zone. Adding a mechanism that is unimplementable, or makes it impossible to exchange existing documents, is unacceptable. I'm not saying "timezones never go in". But we're trying to wrap up a spec that enables exchange of _existing_ documents, none of which have timezones. Let's get some experimentation/ reference model work going, and once a working solution has achieved rough consensus, let's get that added to the NEXT release of OpenFormula. "Rough consensus and running code" is still the best way to achieve useful standards; just compare OSI vs. TCP/IP. --- David A. Wheeler
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]