Date formats around the world

[Richard Gaskin]

stephen barncard wrote:

> 2009/11/28 Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
>>
>> I like using the seconds and did so for many year, but recently
>> I've had to deliver stuff for teams working across time zones,
>> and I found that because the internet time preserves the time
>> zone determining which time/date is earlier than another is more
>> accurate when the data comes from different time zones.
>
> more than the milliseconds?

Both seconds and milliseconds are offset from GMT, so comparisons work 
okay across time zones.

The difficulty with the milliseconds is converting it back to a 
human-readable form - here I always get "invalid date"; did I goof up, 
or are the millisecs not a supported format for conversion?

With the seconds, I didn't describe my circumstance clearly:  it's not 
so much the accuracy but the loss of metadata that got me.   Since 
seconds are ffset from GMT the comparisons themselves are fine, but the 
problem is that you won't know which time zone they came from.  That may 
not be important for many apps but it's useful here. Once you store the 
value you'll never know where it came from, but with internet time you 
get the time zone and the day of the week for free. :)

Extra bonuns points that internet time is also human-readable. Sure, 
it's not the most common display format, but if you ever have to look at 
the raw data it's a nice extra.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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