TIMESTAMPS

date, time and offset from UTC in one string: what it is made of and what it is not

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: code · reference · study

A timestamp reads left to right, from the year down to the fraction of a second; the last field says what all the earlier ones are counted from. The table in the middle holds the RFC’s own five examples, reordered by instant, with the second column reduced to UTC.

TWO OF THE RFC’S EXAMPLES ARE THE SAME SECOND

Section 5.8 prints 1990-12-31T23:59:60Z and 1990-12-31T15:59:60-08:00 as separate examples. These are not two instants but one: the same leap second added at the end of 1990. Reduce both to UTC and each gives 1990-12-31T23:59:60Z.

Where the offset is −08:00 that second falls at 15:59:60 — neither the end of a day nor the end of a year, and nothing in it looks unusual. A leap second happens everywhere at once; it happens at midnight only on the prime meridian.

On the sheet

A timestamp reads left to right, from the year down to the fraction of a second; the last field says what all the earlier ones are counted from. The table in the middle holds the RFC’s own five examples, reordered by instant, with the second column reduced to UTC.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 8 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

TIMESTAMPS

TWO OF THE RFC’S EXAMPLES ARE THE SAME SECOND

On the sheet

Printing

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