3.8. TC TIMEZONE

The current state of the Timezone Service Protocol was presented. The only change is from an XML based approach to JSON. This approach is more in line with the expected use by web developers. The main outstanding service issue is how to deal with inactive timezones. While there appear to be about 80 timezones currently in use there are over 400 in the Olson database. We discussed timezones by reference: that is, servers don’t send timezone data and clients use their own cached copy. This is largely in line with current practice though not in line with the specifications. We talked about a registry for timezone related information and how we should proceed. Finally the issue of allowing a TZID for DATE values was mentioned — RFC5545 disallows it, but users want it.