[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Timezone concept broken in XPath 2.0?
At 11/7/2008 08:22 AM, Michael Ludwig wrote:
Deborah Pickett schrieb:Michael Ludwig wrote:Why aren't the functions specified to use a timezone database and then work like timezone-aware localtime() in Perl and C? Yes, but "the OS" is an implementation, not a standard. Saxon is an implementation, while XSLT 2.0 is a standard. Standards should not (rightly) reference random documents that somebody has put up on the web, particularly when those documents are subject to (from the standard's viewpoint) random changes. And please don't delude yourself into thinking that timezones cannot be changed, quite literally, overnight. When the year 2000 was merely months away, the leader of some south Pacific nation decided that he wanted his country to be the first into the new millennium (well, actually, the first into the year prior to the new millennium, but that's a different argument), he invented a brand new time zone, UTC -14:00, and placed his country into it. Bang...no need to ask the UN, notify the Astronomical Union, or anything else. Just say it's so. Imagine if every implementation of XSLT 2.0, including embedded ones, had to grok timezones all around the world. Implementations of XSLT 2.0 are absolutely welcome (and, IMHO, encouraged) to provide additional functions to handle the "names" of timezones around the world, using whatever source of data they like, whatever linguistic conventions they like, etc. Neither XSLT nor XQuery limit such capabilities in any way. But, of course, the XSLT 2.0 Recommendation cannot say anything about "use this function to make your OS give you the timezone information", because not all OSs do it in the same way, nor do they return the data in the same style or format., I may be mistaken, of course, but systems without these fundamental features are maybe not the hottest candidates for hosting XSLT processors anyway. Absolutely -- until you get bored, or get another job, or get run over by the proverbial bus ;^) , I'd have to use my own timezone extension functions as well: It would probably be difficult to convince the built-in functions to tap into my home-grown database. Do it in whatever way you want, or contact the producer of your XSLT implementation and request an implementation-defined function (not in the fn: namespace, of course) to do what you want. Hope this helps, Jim Michael Ludwig ======================================================================== Jim Melton --- Editor of ISO/IEC 9075-* (SQL) Phone: +1.801.942.0144 Chair, W3C XML Query WG; XQX (etc.) editor Fax : +1.801.942.3345 Oracle Corporation Oracle Email: jim dot melton at oracle dot com 1930 Viscounti Drive Standards email: jim dot melton at acm dot org Sandy, UT 84093-1063 USA Personal email: jim at melton dot name ======================================================================== = Facts are facts. But any opinions expressed are the opinions = = only of myself and may or may not reflect the opinions of anybody = = else with whom I may or may not have discussed the issues at hand. = ========================================================================
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