Re: [office] Date and Timezone: draft text

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi,

On Sunday, 2008-07-06 23:03:27 -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> BTW, _not_ all timezones only increment the "hour" value; some
> have different values of "minutes".  Kabul, Afghanistan, is
> UTC/GMT +4:30 hours. Katmandu, Nepal, is UTC/GMT +5:45 hours.
> And that's only an instantaneous timezone; daylight savings time
> creates MANY more complications.

Just for the records: historical timezone changes create even more
complications, many countries did not stick with their timezone all the
time. Plus timezone offset may even include seconds (or milliseconds),
not just minutes. For example, TZ=Europe/Moscow 1916-07-03 <= date <=
1919-07-01 has a time zone offset of +2:30:48 instead of +3:00, for date
<= 1916-07-03 it is +2:30, TZ=America/St_Johns date <= 1935-03-30 has
a time zone offset of -3:30:52 instead of -3:30

For sources of more confusion see for example
http://unicode.org/cldr/data/tools/java/org/unicode/cldr/util/data/europe
http://unicode.org/cldr/data/tools/java/org/unicode/cldr/util/data/northamerica

Any application claiming to implement timezones probably does not.

  Eike

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