> there was no need to bless real 3-digit time > zones for the corresponding countries. > So we got what the US Army had > allocated, ... except that it *wasn't* what the US Army had allocated. I have to laugh. Seriously, the task of picking 3-letter codes is a national, rather than international, one. Just look at zone -0400, which North Americans tend to call Atlantic Standard Time, but which includes such nations as Equador (on the Pacific coast). I seem to recall that RFC733 allowed AST and a few others, but that tended to imply that there would eventually be as many as 24+24 international standard zones, and I can sympathize with a desire to avoid having to choose among CET, MEZ, NST (Nigerian Standard Time), and a host of others. I'll cheerfully admit that blessing only the continental US time zones plus GMT is decidedly unfair (cheerful because it doesn't inconvenience me!), but I can't imagine a scheme that would make everybody happy. > alternatively we can code things like > '+0100', but that's more than 3 characters VM Mailer has a feature nowadays of translating "+nn" into "+nn00" for mail headers it generates, and individual MUA's could easily adopt the same capability. > everybody knows that the GMT offset is never a multiple of 60 Just for the record, there are places where the offset is *not* a multiple of 60 minutes. Newfoundland and Guyana (or is it Suriname?) come immediately to mind. Then there is Arab time, which traditionally is a variant of local solar time. > I guess the only "legal" solution for me now is to load my TOD > clock with US time and use EDT :-) Ah, but there's always GMT! Personally, I don't mind the present state of anarchy. I get a chuckle out of the gloriously unspecific "LCL" time zone. I'm reminded of Flanders & Swann, who said, "I like my clock 20 minutes fast. Do you?" John