The article explicitly states that people expect this clock to show the correct time in the UK, which I find a somewhat reasonable assumption for the BBC.
But we could stay on UTC all year. Why force everyone to get up one hour earlier in summer? If people want to get up, they can do it themselves. Leave the rest of us in peace.
Did this years ago by grabbing the local time on the user's system clock (as many don't set their TZ correctly), rounding to the nearest 15 mins, and then guessing their TZ from this. 15 mins because Nepal and a few others of that ilk.
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"The corporation also added that it would take around '100 staffing days to make the changes involved in switching to an independent clock'."
I'd like to see how they're going to implement that without relying on the user's time settings in some way.
Sure, they could get the system timezone offset, but that's not really any more safe than using the system clock.
GeoIP lookup? Surely location services won't fly because of the scary browser message.
Any other ideas?
The article explicitly states that people expect this clock to show the correct time in the UK, which I find a somewhat reasonable assumption for the BBC.
So it does.
Well, in that case it's a piece of piss to implement as claudius says below.
Just set it up to the on-load time in UTC. It's the BBC after all, put it in London time and say so somewhere in the footer.
But London time isn't UTC! We're BST at the moment, and GMT in the Winter.
But we could stay on UTC all year. Why force everyone to get up one hour earlier in summer? If people want to get up, they can do it themselves. Leave the rest of us in peace.
Even then, and with my pedant's hat on, GMT !== UTC - they can vary.
Goddamn adjustment milliseconds being all annoying.
Sadly, UK time is not UTC because of daylight savings. For example, right now UK time is one our ahead of UTC time.
Is there a requirement to use time in the user's location? I assumed they just have to show UK time.
Did this years ago by grabbing the local time on the user's system clock (as many don't set their TZ correctly), rounding to the nearest 15 mins, and then guessing their TZ from this. 15 mins because Nepal and a few others of that ilk.
The problem with that in this context is that they expect it to work if the user's clock isn't set accurately.