On 2026-03-04 02:19, Philip Paeps wrote:
What's wrong with "-07"? That's what's used in other parts of the world. Why is North America exceptional?
Inertia. For example, the earliest email standard, Internet RFC 561 (1973)[1], coauthored by the late Ray Tomlinson (widely credited for the 1971 invention of email![2]), was designed mostly for North America because when that RFC was written almost all the ARPANET's nodes were in North America (there was only one exception, in London). RFC 561 specified alphabetic abbreviations, but unsurprisingly only for North American and the UK. A subset of those abbreviations survive not only in the current email standard[3], but also in the drafts for its planned successor[4]. Another example: Version 7 Unix (1979) supported only [ACEMP][DS]T + GMT (good enough for AT&T's North American operations), and similar sets of North-American-only or -mostly abbreviations are still hardwired into a lot of software, including the Thunderbird email program that I'm composing this missive on (see, e.g., [5]). Unfortunately alphabetic abbreviations do not scale world-wide. If we had to do it over again we'd surely stick to numeric abbreviations as that's simpler and cleaner. But that ship sailed long ago. It'd be a stretch to change America/Edmonton, America/Whitehorse, America/Los_Angeles, etc. to use numeric abbreviations by default - rightly or wrongly, too many programs and people would object. And it'd be pretty strange if America/Vancouver used numeric abbreviations even though all its neighbors used alphabetic. Although we could add an option to zic to always generate numeric abbreviations, for people who prefer that, that's not likely to become the default any time soon. Chris Walton's recent email[6] lists reasons to prefer the alphabetic abbreviation "MST" over the alternatives, and that's the direction I'm leaning as well. [1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc561 [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/technology/raymond-tomlinson-email-obitua... [3]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5322 [4]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-emailcore-rfc5322bis/ [5]: https://github.com/mozilla/releases-comm-central/blob/7913b03ecb5d21754eaa82... [6]: https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/message/7Q52N6O2OJSIESKKW...