Yeah, I don't get why they require a location.
On the other hand, -0700 isn't much longer than PST and parses directly.
On the other hand, -0700 isn't much longer than PST and parses directly.
Offsets aren't always the right thing to use either. If you are in America/Chicago and use -0600 for your timezone, that's only accurate during standard time, and is off by an hour for daylight savings time. Knowing how/when to shift offsets is part of the timezone rules associated with a locale, because they are not constant historically.
Offsets are probably going to be fine for recorded timestamps, if all you need is the absolute time that the timestamp represents. But yeah, timezones make things so complicated that there is no one true solution I guess.