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Re: [FEATURE REQUEST] Timezone support in org-mode datestamps and org-ag


From: Tim Cross
Subject: Re: [FEATURE REQUEST] Timezone support in org-mode datestamps and org-agenda
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2023 07:58:30 +1100
User-agent: mu4e 1.9.17; emacs 29.0.60

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> writes:

> First of all, thanks for the detailed suggestion!
> I will need more time to look through the provided links and think about
> the ideas.
>
> I will provide one important consideration you missed in the below comment.
>
> Sterling Hooten <hooten@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> What format and syntax should Org use?
>>
>> A heretical suggestion: We should abandon the day of week abbreviation
>> and use a new format.
>> ...
>> [2023-01-25 Wed 13:57]–[2023-01-26 Thu 13:57]
>>
>> it would be:
>>
>> [2023-01-25T16:57:42Z/2023-01-26T16:57:42Z].
>
> Following ISO and other standards is indeed a reasonable idea. However,
> the standards are not necessarily designed for human consumption.
> In contrast, Org mode is designed to be read by humans as well, even
> without Emacs - just as plain text.
>
> Design for human consumption is one of the reasons we do provide the
> redundant information like week day (I personally did find it extremely
> useful on multiple occasions) and do use spaces, deviating from ISO. The
> above ISO example is barely readable by humans. Another example from
> wiki page of ISO 8601 is even worse: R5/2008-03-01T13:00:00Z/P1Y2M10DT2H30M
>
> And we need to deviate from ISO 8601 anyway. At least, because it does
> not define time zones, only absolute UTC offsets. So, the ability to
> conform with the existing formats remains questionable.


I strongly agree with Ihor here. We want our timestamps to be easily
read and understood by users. I have also found the redundant day of the
week information very useful.

While we could argue that with overlays or similar, you could get the
best of both worlds i.e. a storage format which is easy for functions to
parse and a display format which is easy for humans to parse, but that
would also work only when you view your org files within org mode. One
of the benefits of org mode is its plain text nature and that you can
read most org mode files 'raw' and they are quite easy to understand. 




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