Chris Carrier wrote:
I would make minute offsets mandatory, because we are discussing not only contemporary but historical time zone data, when minute offsets were more common.
If you consider this as an option, you should add the seconds offset!
Until 1978 (?) for some applications, Paris time was in official use; and it's defined as GMT+00:09:21 (I don't know what happen with the 10 leap seconds on 1972-01-01 ;-).
Or Saudi Arabia even now.
On the other side, I don't consider it's worth the value, if you want MHO.
Agreed. Rounding off the timezone offset to the nearest minute should be fine; applications which need better precision than this will probably use Zulu time (UTC) anyway. For what it's worth: My opinion on the "minutes in the zone offset" question is to make them manditory in this proposed profile. Stylistically I also like the idea of having a ":" between the hours and minutes, but I won't miss it if it's not there. I feel that having seconds (and fractions thereof) in the timezone offset to be excessive. --Ken Pizzini