RFC 3339 vs. ISO 8601

Note that Python still lacks any way to parse these dates in the standard library. You have to use a third party library to parse them. You might think `datetime.fromisoformat` parsed ISO dates but you'd be wrong; it doesn't support the trailing Z or any other form of timezone information. The docs are clear about this, and the developer discussion I've read basically boils down to "it's too hard to parse ISO dates so we didn't do it here." This…

I find it weird that there's no way to specify a future date/time with respect to a specific timezone, e.g. Europe/London. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to be able to specify a meeting in London, on July 1st 2030, at 6pm local time - no matter what happens to UK timezones between now and then. The UK currently uses Z+00:00 from November to March, and daylight savings of Z+01:00 from April to October (roughly)[0]. But it's possible that…

My favorite datetime format is "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss". I consider it the "Markdown for time". It is human-friendly and computer-friendly at the same time. It is supported by many languages and databases. It is so elegant and common that even though it is not part of a standard, LLMs started to use it when writing answers: Me: SQLite: Add 1 day and 3 hours to a date. Perplexity: SELECT DATETIME('2025-09-07 07:51:00', '+1 day', '+3 hours');