Alpern.Ibm-Sj@Rand-Relay.ARPA (David Alpern) (02/01/84)
Pardon me, but I think we have a while before we have to worry about how people on Mars would timestamp their messages. Like Benson, I as well use the zone in the timestamp to get an idea of the location of the sender. Sure, it's not 100% accurate, and maybe it'd be nice if a user could specify the zone that would be best to use on messages he's sending. This is something we might consider when writing mail sending programs. No change to any of the "standards" is involved here. However, I somehow missed hearing about the problem that the use of zones other than UTC leads to. Was there one? If so, someone please resend a copy of the original message to me. If not: Many of the mailers around are used more for internal (within some school or company) than external mailing. If I'm on MIT-EECS, and get a message from someone on MIT-ML, I care how recently he sent the message (local time) more than I do what Universal Time it was. RFC 822 does specify a human readable header, and not a machine readable one, in general. For example, consider the usefulness of the "name:;" nomenclature for a distribution list to any program without access to the original list file. I would much prefer if any program that tried to deal with the time for some reason (does anyone???) had to convert than that the mail sending program and mail reading program had to convert at either end for human use. Again, I'd be interested in hearing why this discussion seems important, i.e. what we're trying to prevent or solve. So many mailers aren't even 822 compatible when it comes to dates that I would think the zone issue would be rather minor. With apologies for flaming, Dave
Margulies@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA (Benson I. Margulies) (02/02/84)
The problem is that we do not have an agreed upon unique list of time zone identifiers. Thus the ISO date standard calls for both the zone abbreviation and its offset from UTC. I still do not see why that is not an adequate solution, though.
POSTEL@USC-ISIF.ARPA (02/02/84)
In response to the message sent Wed, 1 Feb 84 19:44 EST from bim@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA I don't think i have ever seen a list of international standard time zone designators from ISO or CCITT or any standards organization. I think the only official international standard way to indicate a time zone is by a numeric offset. --jon. -------
Rick.Gumpertz@CMU-CS-A.ARPA (Richard H. Gumpertz) (02/02/84)
So we use ANSI (because we are Americans, mostly) for American time zones in alphanumeric and other time zones in numeric. As I recall, this is a superset of the ISO standard but conveys more information (CDT differs from EST but are numerically equal).
DaviesNJ.SysMaint%aucc@ucl-cs.arpa ("Neil Davies%aucc"@ucl-cs.arpa) (02/02/84)
Date: 1 Feb 1984 18:59:44 PST
From: POSTEL@arpa.usc-isif
Subject: Re: UTC Time stamping
In response to the message sent Wed, 1 Feb 84 19:44 EST from bim@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
I don't think i have ever seen a list of international standard time zone
designators from ISO or CCITT or any standards organization. I think the
only official international standard way to indicate a time zone is by
a numeric offset.
--jon.
-------
Jumping ot the filling cabinet. He gets out X.409 CCITT Message handling
systems presentaion Trasfer syntax and Notation) or at least a draft of
it.
One of the sections refers to "UTC", and the presentation layer
representation of it.
In the references section there are three ISO refernces namely:
ISO 2014, Writing Calendar dates in all-numeric form.
ISO 3307, Information interchange- representation of time of the day.
ISO 4031, Information interchange- representation of local time differentials.
also one to
B.11, Legal time; use of the term UTC
(don't know who origniated that one).
'Fraid I don't happen to have copies of those standards.
Neil Davies.