[tz] -00:00

Zefram zefram at fysh.org
Wed Jun 6 20:29:00 UTC 2012


Ian Abbott wrote:
>"(UTC+00:00)" or "(UTC-00:00)"

Speaking of this, did anyone else notice that

(a) ISO 8601 requires a zero offset to be denoted with a "+" sign,
    forbidding "-00" (ISO 8601:2000 clause 5.1.1 or ISO 8601:2004 clause
    3.4.2), and

(b) RFC 3339 is supposedly a profile of ISO 8601, and

(c) RFC 3339 *does* allow "-00", denoting the same offset as "+00",
    but connoting that it's not specifying a preferred offset?

I got suspicious about this some months ago, but only got around to
confirming the conflict last week.  I'm a bit ashamed that I didn't
notice it in time to influence RFC 3339, but in my defence I wasn't
actually in the WG.

This is, of course, only tangentially relevant to the TZ database.
The most closely related situations that we're directly concerned with are
offsets in zic source files and in the Etc/GMT[-+]* zone names, neither
of which makes any claim to conform to either of these contradictory
standards.

-zefram


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