[JDEV] Timezone (summary)

[Isotope2k at aol.com]

The timezone issue seems a bit clouded.

I'm going to attempt a requirements analysis of timezone information.
My apologies in advance if I've missed anything.

First, do we need timezone information (what benefits does it give us)?

1)  Timezone information could be used by the client to give the receiver
the ability to know what time the sender sent the message.
2)  Timezone information could be used by server the asses efficiency in
messaging routing.
3)  Timezone information could be used by the client to sort messages 
according
to some sender-time based scheme.

Are the benefits described above already available to us through alternate 
means?

1)  Assuming the "instantaneous" delivery of Jabber messages (IM afterall) and
assuming that our choice of timestamp format allows for such calculations (as
all three proposals do) timezone information can be extracted from timestamp
by comparing local time to the timestamp and deriving the +/- GMT shifts.
  Admittedly, this is a bit kludgy.  However, many of the problems associated 
with
this message (such as fast/slow local/remote clocks, lack of local timezone 
info)
are present with the alternative of including timezone information.  
Futhermore,
this method requires more work to be done by the client.

2)  TCP/IP and "normal" timestamping both allow for efficiency assessment.

3)  Generally, the human user's client (to whom this kind of time relativity 
is probably
exclusive of interest to), will organize senders in a "buddy list" of sorts, 
and as such
this kind of sorting would be done on a per-sender basis, and thus timezone 
info would
be of little use- UNLESS the sender is traversing timezones between messages.

I think it would be useful if we constructed this discussion in a more 
high-level 
manner (such as this).  Let's decide if, and how, the timezone information 
would be
useful, and then ensure that the uses aren't already covered, and THEN drill 
down to 
possible implementations.

Conclusion:
Inclusion of timezone information is of primary (exclusive?) use to human 
clients
in order to determine the relative local time of the sender.  As such, this 
information
should be optional (I believe that is the general concensus).  There are 
alternative(s) 
to determining this data that do not require the addition of timezone 
information, thus
I feel that it is not necessary to add this to the project.  If a client 
wishes to make
this information available to the user, it is not necessary for Jabber to 
supply it.

I eagerly await futher discussion.

Christopher Atkins

P.S.  Thank you so much, Waleed, for your summaries.