Adding datetime to Foswiki

Hello

My name is Julian Levens and I'm working on the Free Open Source Wiki
project (www.foswiki.org). I was hoping someone would be prepared to help  
us
by answering the following questions.

A little background to start. Foswiki is actually much more than a wiki as
it provides a platform to develop applications, integrated into the wiki.

The wiki stores it's data in text files but has never supported a datetime
field. We are now looking at adding such a field and we really want to get
this right first time.

We see three fundamental parts to a datetime field.
     + The raw datetime i.e 2012-03-02T23:10:12
        + leap-seconds possible, but dependent on application to support it,
epoch time normally available from the OS
        + Is this wise, are there any gotchas?
     + A timezone offset or Z
     + The timezone name e.g. Europe/Amsterdam

The discussion within the community is primarily around whether we need to
store the timezone name e.g. "Europe/Amsterdam".

Or to put it another way, what do we lose if we do not store this?

Is there anything else we need to consider?

Thanks very much

-- 
Julian Levens
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