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hhebbo | 4 years ago
The feedback and arguments are highly valuable. I really like the way of thinking about time zones in your explanation.
As you mentioned, hTime is a time format and a tool, which I like describing as a "clock". A clock combines both concepts. Clocks is a way to measure, read, and communicate time. With hTime, that's the goal. Now with the formatting piece from your examples "2021-10-20+5-03:36, 2021-10-20Z22:36, 2021-10-20Q:36", all of them actually look and read the same somehow. To be honest, Z22 or Q isn't that big of a difference IMHO. The difference is the math still. It's very simple math, just adding or subtracting, but it gets confusing when more than one time zones are involved. Take a meeting between 2+ time zones. The question then is: What is the best time to have a call between 3 different locations? The math, as simple as it is, get a bit confusing to find the best time. I've been in several situations and heard that many users of time zones miss a call by +-1 hour only because they miscalculated time zones.
The other aspect is time communication. That's the case when a deadline or an event is happening somewhere around the world. We usually communicate time using 3-4-lettered time zone names that make it even harder to remember. For example the Olympics, there was a game at 2pm Tokyo time; what is that for the rest of the world? Before doing the math, we need to know what Tokyo's time zone is, what the Z or UTC equivalent is, and then do the simple math. It's almost always a 2-step thing. With hTime as a clock, it's only the mapping. So if they say the game is at R:00, I have the mapping in my head and done! 1 step. With the example of a meeting between 3 time zones, that's then 5-6 steps with Z or UTC, but with hTime, it's again 1 step only. That's the kind of thinking I have behind "no more time zone math" and the idea of hTime's clock with the mapping between global and local times.
Happy to hear what you think
nixpulvis|4 years ago
ZXX:XX surely. For example, we could meet at Z1340 even. To me this is a question making the string unique enough that people won't accidentally think of it as a local time. The military uses 24-hour times in a similar manar, e.g. "Oh-seven-hundred", etc. So aside from Z13:40 possibly looking too close to just 13:40, it does communicate the time for people to meet, regardless of how many timezones are involved. What's the best time to meet is a whole other question...
I honestly haven't even started to think about how this integrates with DST and other funky locale calendar rules.
I'm going to be busy for a bit, but hopefully I remember to come back to this thread...
hhebbo|4 years ago