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votinginfoproject / vip-specification

The Voting Information Project XML specification.
http://vip-specification.readthedocs.io/en/release/
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Allow for named timezones #458

Closed jennifertlovell closed 5 months ago

jennifertlovell commented 1 year ago

VIP spec requires UTC offset for structured hours in TimeWithZone element. Update in #457 relaxes regex, allowing for named timezones to be used instead of UTC offset. Proposed change, as currently written, is very permissive. Named timezone validation (validating that the value matches with an existing IANA timezone) will therefore not take place in XML validation. Should discuss other validation steps and where this falls in the workflow, or if we want to use a more strict approach.

jungshadow commented 1 year ago

Hi @jennifertlovell! Long-time lurker here given our connection to the project, the NIST CDFs, and the interest in our standards converging. Regarding the latter, this change would be impossible for us to support. VIP's TimeWithZone element is based on xsd:string, but the NIST CDF elements are based on xsd:time. If we wanted to support this, we'd have to weaken the existing typing, which isn't the approach we want to take considering system interoperability. Plus, as you noted, validation could get extremely tricky. Given that, can I ask what the motivation is for this change?