2 ms·
What's the point of unqualified offsets like that anyway? You either use UTC or a local time in the appropriate tz.
by jobigoud 8y ago
What's the point of unqualified offsets like that anyway? You either use UTC or a local time in the appropriate tz.
- x1798DE 8y agoThey are useful for when you want the semantics of UTC but still a human readable time. One example is logs that people will actually read. People have a hard time doing mental math but 14:00-05:00 is just as valid as 19:00+00:00 and easier for people in Eastern Time. It's also useful for disambiguating a local time: 2018-11-04T01:45-05:00 America/New_York 2018-11-04T01:45-04:00 America/New_York That said, I do think they are mostly around for less noble reasons: they are way easier to serialize than actual time zone rules.
- zaarn 8y agoUseful when you need to store the offset of a specific event in the past where the timezone data doesn't matter. Especially logs since you want to know when it occured, so you store unqualified offset so the DoS attack doesn't suddenly happen an hour earlier than it says in the logs if DST happens between attack and the admin reading the log.