Re: RFC 822

* Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-09-23 06:48]:

> Saxon isn't currently handling the "Z" and "z" specifiers in
> format-date/time correctly. Hopefully this will be fixed at the
> next release - though whether the answer will actually be what RFC
> 822 expects is an open question. I didn't realize RFC 822 had the
> US time zone names hard-coded into it - talk about cultural bias!

    It's from our defense community. Those people are supposed to
    have a cultural bias. Sorry.

    RFC 822 dates were designed for mail headers, and are not for
    end-user consumption.

> There's a bit of a problem with these as there's no way of knowing
> whether a timezone of -05:00 means EST or CDT, even if you know to
> use a US timezone (which one can get from the country argument). 

    My picture and process is correct then. Go to GMT and make GMT a
    literal in the picture, because XSLT 2.0 is not able to give a
    correct US timzone (and most things want GMT anyway). If there
    were a further parameters, maybe a latitude and longitude, you
    could also implement daylight savings, but I don't see how you
    could do it otherwise. 
    
    If I wanted to be serious about it, I'd create a table to
    lookup the day name and month name, since it is spec'd value in
    computer readable date format, and not user readable format.
    From what I see in the XSLT 2.0 specification, day names are
    implementation defined. Another XSLT vendor might decide that
    culturally, in the United States, Wedensday is Humpday.

    Thanks.

--
Alan Gutierrez - alan@xxxxxxxxx
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