Dot-time – a universal convention for conveying time

dotti.me

1 pointtazjin3 comments

Just noticed this hasn't been posted before. I've been using this format for a while (with patched email clients, git and some other date-displaying software) to get a better grasp of timezone-independent time without dismissing the local offset.

This format is extremely useful for things like reading mail threads with chronological timestamps (while still being able to see the authors' timezones) or noting down travel itineraries that cross many different timezones.

How does one represent 30 offsets like India? Also dot isn’t easily typable so this is dead in the water.

> How does one represent 30 offsets like India?

I guess not differently from ISO8601? Something like

2019-06-19T22·13+0530 or +05:30 (both seem to be valid in ISO8601, not sure which I prefer).

> Also dot isn’t easily typable so this is dead in the water.

Yeah, this is annoying. The people I know who use this format either have a compose-key set up (impractical for the majority of computer users, including most tech people), or transliterate it in ASCII as `.-` (which doesn't look as nice).

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