637920 - Time zones in ISO format

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, defect)

Description

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20110209 Firefox/4.0b11
Build Identifier: 

ISO 8601 defines a format to specify times formats in different time zones, for example, my local time is 20:50-3, which means it's 20:50 at UTC-3.  Just using "20:50 UTC -3" or "20:50 GMT -3" might work too.

However, currently, bugzilla uses different countries' local times, for example,
PTS, PDT and alike.

People around the world can't be expected to know what PTS, PDT, and dozens more abbreviations mean for several country around the globe, however, everyone knows their offset with UTC (or GMT if you feel this is more "popular").

This is far more friendly for something that is used worldwide (though maybe slightly less to people living anywhere PDT is used), specially, since, AFAIK, PDT can have vary on summer, and things like that.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

Not everybody knows his offset to GMT. Also, the offset is not the same all year long due to daylight saving time, so this would be confusing. Moreover, when you choose your timezone in your preferences, the country and city are displayed instead, which leads to no confusion to the user.

Comment 2

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

I must disagree in your first statement, I believe everyone knows their offset to GMT (except kids maybe, though it's likely that not everyone knows what UTC is).

Many cities do not appear, or are know to be wrong everywhere, for example, Argentina has 2 times zones most years, but all online stuff just shows one (or several cities all with the same timezones, which is worse).

This tends to make me look for another city (in another country) with the same offset, but since that cities timezone may change on summer, I have to watch out.

Generally speaking, whenever I interact with someone from another country, I use GMT time, or specify my offset, this seems to be the de-facto standard for talking from people somewhere else, not using localtimes.