[whatwg] Forms-related feedback

[TAMURA, Kent]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 9:47 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> > However, I'm not sure how this can be presented to the user. In the
> > example above I suggested that time input UI should be accompanied with
> > local time zone ("Europe/Helsinki" in my example). However, that would
> > suggest that this info would be transferred to the server and that the
> > server is expected to follow political time zone changes to that
> > timezone. The user could be assuming that he has defined a specific time
> > in a specific timezone (an absolute time as far has he knows).
> >
> > In the reality, the server would like to transfer *the responsibility*
> > for the possible future time zone changes to the user -- the server
> > expects user to come by and modify the absolute time in case the user
> > local timezone has been modified since entering this absolute time. I
> > have absolutely no idea how on earth this could be explained to casual
> > user. And even if it could be explained, I'm pretty sure the end user
> > wouldn't be happy with that responsibility.

> Yeah. Indeed.


> > The next best choice would be to have datetime-with-timezone but
> > unfortunately
> >
> > (1) Official database for all timezones does not exist
> > (2) Official timezone names (or labels) do not exist
> > (3) Timezones are subject to future political decisions
> >
> > The problems (1) and (2) make transferring the timezone information from
> > the end user to the server very problematic and the problem (3) makes
> > any work to fix (1) and (2) a bit pointless. This is because even if UA
> > could successfully inform the server about the correct timezone, the
> > server could be using a week old timezone data that is not up to the
> > latest political events. Or the server might be using latest timezone
> > data but the UA could be using three year old data. In either case, the
> > absolute time in UTC could be different for the server and UA.

> Indeed.

So, I think it's impossible for us to build reasonable UI for
type=datetime.  It should be removed from the specification.



--
TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google