[zachrose]

Except that ISO-8601 doesn’t include anything as useful as a political time zone, just an offset from UTC. That’d be good if UTC offset was useful for anything, but instead it just adds to the confusion.

[zachrose]

A lot of this was really cleared up for me by Evan Czaplicki's documentation for the Elm time library: https://github.com/elm/time

[chillfox]

UTC offset is way more useful than those 3-4 character timezone abbreviations.

Just have a look at the list from Wikipedia [1] and notice how many repeats there are.

As an example AMT could be either UTC+4 or UTC-4.

And this doesn't even includes the various local acronyms that people use around the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zone_abbreviation...

[hobs]

I didn't downvote you, but just for reference the time zone abbreviations you are supposed to use are in the tzdata db, and are listed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

If you don't use these, you will inevitably be somewhat wrong due to leap issues, political changes in time, or the like.

[hashhar]

Political zones are not the same thing as the abbreviated zones.

IANA time zone identifiers are fully-qualified and unambiguous like America/Los_Angeles or Asia/Kolkata.

[chillfox]

Thanks, I have never heard the term “political zones” before, so I made an assumption.