Hopefully nobody uses this "standard" that bakes in an off-by-one error into the human readable form. IMHO if code is doing extra parsing to handle -ve years,

Hopefully nobody uses this "standard" that bakes in an off-by-one error into the human readable form. IMHO if code is doing extra parsing to handle -ve years, they should have enough logic to know to how to skip the zeroth year when converting to and from the human readable form.