which, if you think the problem through enough you'll have to conclude that you do need to store the time zone, unless you just don't really care about having accurate times. Read through some of the other comments and you'll realize that there's certain kinds of calculations and comparisons you just can't do without the time zone, and a historical time zone database, and a leap seconds database. Do not make the mistake of assuming that dealing with times and dates can be easy.
Mad late reply but i use epoch when my time needs don't matter. Aka: I can get by without worrying about epoch not being second precise and I don't need to worry about dates except to display them in non UTC.
For my needs 90% of the time iso8601 is overkill and unnecessary.
But dates in what I do don't need to be complicated. Which is rare. Also I never said working with times and dates is easy, evaluate your needs for the situation. Going full tilt with timezones and full date parsing for some general server logs for example doesn't always make sense is all I'm saying. Tschuss!
