Hey Ozz!

 ON> See we can not say that, as the ISO standard also had "+" as
 ON> optional, until it was revised in 2004.

References please.  I've never seen any mention of the + as an option in any
official documentation of utc offsets and in fact have seen the opposite
including that UTC (+0000) is to include a + sign despite it not being behind
or ahead of UTC (ISO 8601).  Another reference worthy of mention is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_tim... which is worth comparing
 to the list in fts-4008.002.  The only reference to 2004 I see as far as ISO
8601 is concerned is as follows (and I quote);

  The section dictating sign usage (section 3.4.2 in the 2004 edition
  of the standard) states that a plus sign must be used for a
  positive or zero value, and a minus sign for a negative value.
  Contrary to this rule, RFC 3339, which is otherwise a profile of
  ISO 8601, permits the use of "-00", with the same denotation as
  "+00" but a differing connotation.

If you could please provide further evidence of an ISO, or RFC, prior to 2004
that states the + character is optional I'd appreciate it.  However I doubt it
will change anything given the current state of well used modern dating
applications that insist on displaying the + character when and where it is
applicable.  As for the above quote, and if my ageed memory serves me correct,
the "differing connotation" is a - character can be used in UTC when it is
converted from a different timezone other than UTC itself.

  date --iso-8601=seconds = 2019-03-12T21:35:03+00:00
  date --rfc-3339=seconds = 2019-03-12 21:36:50+00:00

From the above it looks to me that both standards are in sync wrt the display
of utc with a + character.  Also worthy of note is the : character to delimit
hours from minutes in the offset.  To make that work it has to use the %:z
specifier, or even %::z to include seconds, as shown below;

  date +%:z = +00:00
  date +%::z = +00:00:00

Put *THAT* in your corrupted fts-4008.002 standard and rotate! :::evil grin:::

Life is good,
Maurice

... Don't cry for me I have vi.
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