Military / NATO single-letter time zone names
Interesting bit from the new RFC 2822, which supersedes the RFC 822 Internet email header format: The form "+0000" SHOULD be used to indicate a time zone at Universal Time. Though "-0000" also indicates Universal Time, it is used to indicate that the time was generated on a system that may be in a local time zone other than Universal Time and therefore indicates that the date-time contains no information about the local time zone. [...] The 1 character military time zones were defined in a non-standard way in [RFC822] and are therefore unpredictable in their meaning. The original definitions of the military zones "A" through "I" are equivalent to "+0100" through "+0900" respectively; "K", "L", and "M" are equivalent to "+1000", "+1100", and "+1200" respectively; "N" through "Y" are equivalent to "-0100" through "-1200" respectively; and "Z" is equivalent to "+0000". However, because of the error in [RFC822], they SHOULD all be considered equivalent to "-0000" unless there is out-of-band information confirming their meaning. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 18:08:16 +0100 From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk> Message-ID: <E14uH9k-0002OP-00@wisbech.cl.cam.ac.uk> | Interesting bit from the new RFC 2822, which supersedes the RFC 822 | Internet email header format: I'm not sure it is all that interesting really. I mean, when was the last time anyone actually saw one of those one letter military type timezones (which can't even express anything not an even hour from UTC) other than possibly Z in an e-mail? Also note from RFC1123 (October 1989) The military time zones are specified incorrectly in RFC-822: they count the wrong way from UT (the signs are reversed). As a result, military time zones in RFC-822 headers carry no information. so there isn't really anything new in 2822 (other than perhaps the addition of "-0000" to say "I have no idea" as a formalism). kre
Quoth Markus Kuhn on Mon, Apr 30, 2001:
Interesting bit from the new RFC 2822, which supersedes the RFC 822 Internet email header format:
The 1 character military time zones were defined in a non-standard way in [RFC822] and are therefore unpredictable in their meaning.
This was also mentioned in RFC 1123, chapter 5.2.14, page 56: The military time zones are specified incorrectly in RFC-822: they count the wrong way from UT (the signs are reversed). As a result, military time zones in RFC-822 headers carry no information. Vadik. -- A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. -- G. B. Shaw
participants (3)
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Markus Kuhn -
Robert Elz -
Vadim Vygonets