Ashley Yakeley wrote:
As the author of a library that consumes leap-second tables, my ideal format would look something like this: a text file with first line for MJD of expiration date, and each subsequent line with the MJD of the start of the offset period, a tab, and then the UTC-TAI seconds difference.
As an author (and good gawd, an editor) of an XML standard and schema to convey transient astronomical event alerts - including potentially leap seconds - I'd have to presume that XML would do the trick. The thread was a discussion of appending enough context to an individual timestamp to avoid the need for providing historical leap seconds table updates at all. Someone else pointed out that this didn't preserve the historical record. I wanted to additionally point out that the cost of appending the entire leap second table to every timestamp would itself remain quite minimal for many years, and further, that even getting rid of leap seconds doesn't remove the requirement for conveying information equivalent to this table (on some cadence to some precision). The complications are inherent in the distinction between time-of-day (Earth orientation) and interval time. The intrinsic cost of properly supporting both types of time is quite minimal. Rob
