Victor Sudakov wrote:
But these abbreviations are already sanctified by a long tradition.
Not really. And I have some experience in this, as I am the one who *invented* that "long tradition", and I've seen it not catch on.
When are you planning to migrate the abbreviations like EST or HST?
EST and HST have been commonly used by reliable English-language sources for decades. We did not invent these abbreviations, and don't plan to remove them.
If a timezone has a non-integer offset like 10:30, what numeric abbreviation are you planning to use?
The one that zic generates with %z. +1030 in that case.
Nobody here in Tomsk calls our timezone "+07" in practice, I assure you. That's just another invention
Yes, I wouldn't expect people in Tomsk to use English-language abbreviations. They would use Russian-language abbreviations, if anything. Numeric abbreviations reasonably common, and are standardized by ISO 8601.
We call it "6-я часовая зона" (officially), or "Красноярское время", but you don't allow non-ascii names.
Yes, the idea is to use an English-language abbreviation if there is one in common use, and to fall back on a numeric abbreviation otherwise.