> You can think of ISO 8601 as basically this - a way to describe absolute points in global time without references to politically motivated definitions of loca

> You can think of ISO 8601 as basically this - a way to describe absolute points in global time without references to politically motivated definitions of local time zones. But that's TAI. Any calendar is a consensus agreement and amenable to politics (see Samoa skipping a day in 2011 [0], and all the bizarre calendar changes of the 18th century). ISO 8601 sounds simple and reliable, but only because it refused to adopt most of the human complexity of timezones. Kinda like "extended ASCII", that allowed programmers to pretend just a little longer that all characters can fit in 8-bits. And we don't have a Unicode for dates. If Tokyo changes their DST rules or leap seconds happen, your simple and reliable offline countdown timer will be wrong. How is that acceptable for a calendar-based (i.e. human) format? Or if I'm naming my files with ISO 8601 dates and relying on lexicographic sorting (as others in this thread suggested), I'll have gaps or overlaps after DST changes. Am I crazy? I'm getting lots of disagreement, so I must be doing something wrong, but the more I think about it, the more I believe that ISO 8601 succeeded by stealthily sacrificing correctness. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16351377 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16351377