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Subject: Re: [security-services] the "NotOnOrAfter" issue


> Since dateTime does uniquely identify a time what is the value of
> requiring dateTime to be expressed in strict UTC?

There are some amazing subtleties, so that getting the math right can be 
tricky; remember that you *subtract* the offset, so you have to 
"borrow", so things like 2am on March 1, 2000 in Boston (EST5EDT) can be 
hard. If you do the "obvious" thing -- parse the time into something 
like the Unix time_t, number of seconds since an epoch -- you lose out 
because of leap-seconds; they get lost.  Now I, personally, don't care 
about leap seconds, but if I were writing a high-value financial system 
I would be very concerned if my infrastructure vendor wasn't aware of 
thsoe kinds of things.

As for sub-seconds, it's an issue of clarity -- folks are used to 
rounding, not truncation; what should 1.5 - .5 be?  What about 1.6 - .9? 
  etc? I think truncation is the only safe answer, otherwise you have to 
worry about XML Schema implementation errors when doing 
valuespace/lexical-space conversions of entries like 
2.999999999999999999999 seconds.  But as I said, folks are used to rounding.

Remember, if it's subclasses, it CAN Be treatred as a dateTime, so it's 
no extra work.  It's just a matter of enforcing the semantics in the 
contract definition, which is a good thing.
	/r$

-- 
Zolera Systems, http://www.zolera.com
Information Integrity, XML Security



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