[whatwg] 'datetime-local' and 'datetime' comments

[Mounir Lamouri]

On 20/11/12 06:17, Ian Hickson wrote:
> FWIW, the UI I'd expect for today's datetime, maybe renamed to 
> "datetime-global", would be a date/time picker that works just like the 
> one without a timezone, except that it then converts the time you give 
> into UTC. So far example, I'm in the PST time zone, so if I said November 
> 19th, 5pm, it would send that as November 20th, 1am UTC.

Then, maybe a better naming could be "datetime-utc"?

> The idea is to be able to get a precise time from the user without having 
> to worry about what time zone the user's in, and without the user having 
> to worry about what time zone other users are in. This would be very 
> useful for scheduling global events, e.g. when a hangout is to happen, or 
> when a game is to start, etc. I really don't think this is a rare thing. 
> In fact I think mostly it's the one to encourage people to use, which is 
> why it's called "datetime" currently, with the one without timezones, 
> which I think will overall be rarer, having the longer name.

I feel like the main issue is that we disagree in which type is the most
used. I guess it highly depends on who you ask. I tend to book way more
often trains or flights than I arrange meetings.

> I agree that existing UIs are unfortunate, but they should be fixed. It 
> would be unfortunate to push people towards the timezone-less control just 
> because we screwed up the UI and then renamed the type in shame.

What do you think would be a good UI? Does something that would allow
selecting a date/time in the current user's TZ and then have the
information sent to the server in UTC would be a good UI?
But then, there would be no real difference between the "datetime" and
the "datetime-foo" widget, right?

If the main difference between "datetime" and "datetime-foo" is the
format of the value we send to the server, can't we simply always send
the timezone information? So, servers who care about the user's timezone
could do the conversion, and others could simply ignore the information.

Cheers,
--
Mounir