Re: [Emailcore] WGLC: draft-ietf-emailcore-rfc5322bis-03

[Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]>]

John Levine wrote in
 <[e-mail]>:
 |>The second (which, incidentally, may interact with some work now
 |>going on in the SADATE WG), is whether it was a mistake to
 |>obsolete all time zone names in RFC5322.  You have, I think,
 |>made a strong argument for retaining/ reinstating UT or Z.
 |
 |I don't agree. The point of the date header is to represent a
 |timestamp reliably and numeric timezones do that. If MUAs want to
 |display them differently, they can. I use Alpine which is about the
 |most minimalist MUA around and even it rewrites the timestamps into my
 |local time zone when it shows them to me.

That is the problem, yes.

 |As far as +0000 and -0000, I'd leave them alone. I suppose there might
 |still be some IoT devices connected to the Internet that send mail and
 |know the time but not the time zone, but I don't see any point in
 |trying to do anything about it now.

I would assume they implicitly go for UTC, which is ok, since that
can be converted to anything else correctly (letting aside leap
second adjustments here).

 |For GMT vs UTC vs TAI, sure, whatever. All the computers I know
 |believe whatever NTP tells them.

My personal preference is CLOCK_TAI for computation, but keeping
solar time / earth rotation as exactly as possible for civil time,
there is a history, and it is a tremendous scientific achievement
that "we" are now capable to do it *this* exactly.
In the tremendous loss of culture and philosophy, i happily turn
my clocks in a conscious second.
But that is of course off-topic.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)