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scottwater / jquery.detect_timezone

A jQuery plugin for detect_timezone.js
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Fails to accurately address ambiguity #1

Open globalcitizen opened 12 years ago

globalcitizen commented 12 years ago

Right now, I am in Bangkok and this code detects my timezone as Asia/Jakarta.

Whilst neither the Asia/Jakarta timezone or the Asia/Bangkok timezone have daylight savings, nor do they differ in offset, there are still important differences.

For instance, it is customary in Thailand to present the year in the Thai Buddhist calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_solar_calendar

The main point is that the library fails to solve date presentation issues. Therefore, any internationalization strategy for a global site is not able to rely on this jQuery plugin to do more than detect the probable UTC offset that the user would like to see. However, since javascript supports this natively anyway (both local and coordinated times can be queried), this library really seems to be of dubious use for any real purpose.

(Input is natively available, output is not really useful)

If an accurate guess at user timezone is required, server-side geolocation would appear to be, overall, a more accurate strategy.

rlidwka commented 12 years ago

Anything is right here. Asia/Jakarta and Asia/Bangkok is the same timezone since 1964, so it doesn't matter which one you choose as long as it is not historical.