Minute offsets

[Chris Carrier]

Markus G. Kuhn wrote: 
 
> I do not have very strong feelings about the optionality of the minute 
> offset, but my arguments for it are: 
 
>   - only *very* few countries use it today and time zones are so often 
>     redefined that there is some good hope that the 30-min offset zones 
>     will disappear in 2020 or so. Then, we would not carry around 
>     any more the obsolete minute fields in our headers. 
 
>   - I personally think that the hour only offset is much more readable 
>     and that the additional implementation effort (one single "if" in 
>     my sample code) is so trivial that it is really not worth any 
>     discussion. 
 
I would make minute offsets mandatory, because we are discussing not only
contemporary but historical time zone data, when minute offsets were more
common.  Also IMHO minute offsets are not necessarily a Bad Thing; a small
country without any of its territory going through an hourly meridian but with
territory going through a minute offset might be better served by the minute
offset zone; Portugal and Ireland, for example, fit GMT-0:30 closer than GMT
or GMT-1.
 
What I would favor is putting a colon in between hours and minutes, for
readability; i.e. the time in Darwin, Australia is easier to read as GMT or
UT+09:30 than as +0930.
 
My $0.02 worth...