Subject: Extension to HTTP : TimeZone

From: MagicalTux <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 21:13:45 +0300

Hello,

This is my first time sending something here, so I hope I'm in the right
place for this kind of discussion.

In fact, I'm writing this message as a PHP developper. I often write
software which interacts with the user, and I have a problem which
always happens when I need to display a time to the user.

In order to get the user's time, we usually use some JavaScript trick,
by getting the time on the client side and comparing it with the server
side in order to calculate the difference ... 

So, in order to fix that, I had the idea of a new header sent by the
client. It would be always sent, like the other
Accept-Language/Accept-Content/etc...

The header would be named TimeZone (or Accept-Timezone ?) and would
contain either :

- The full timezone info, like Europe/Paris
- A RFC822 valid timezone

The first case would be preferable, as it may be required to send mails
to the user in a batch, some special cases may happen like:
- The user subscribes while DST if off, his zoneinfo is recorded in the
database
- Some times later, the admin sends an email to all the users with, for
example, a rendezvous on a chat.

If the zoneinfo is stored as +0200, some people may be 1 hour off,
however if the data stored is using the full zoneinfo (Europe/Paris for
example) the date will be displayed correctly in the user's timezone.

Of course, I was thinking about that for a few years, and I really think
many developpers are waiting for this specific feature.

Recent additions in server-side languages like PHP of timezone functions
are probably the best proof of that.

I created wiki pages in French & English about this matter :
http://en.wiki.ookoo.org/wiki/New_header_proposition_to_the_HTTP_protocol_:_TimeZone
http://fr.wiki.ookoo.org/wiki/Proposition_de_nouveau_header_au_protocole_HTTP_:_TimeZone

However I didn't know where to post that. I guess the IETF would be the
best place, however I have no idea of what the "wg" stands for in this
mailing list.

I searched a while, and didn't find any better place for this
proposition.

I hope that at least someone on this mailing list can help me, or at
least this idea. I'm not really good with english, however I tried my
best here.

Best regards,
Mark Karpelès