] But for a worldwide standard to make sense, it would have to define exactly ] what a time zone is. That presents some difficulties. Different users may ] have varying expectations. The prevalence of the Anglophone North American ] paradigm has given rise to certain expectations which may be ] self-contradictory. ] ] Counties in Kentucky ] have opted to switch from Central Time to Eastern Time. Do we have to call ] them different time zones, or can we use the concept of a time zone that has ] variable boundaries? Is it within the scope of the standard to describe the ] boundaries, and their evolution through time? I think common usage outside this group is that a time zone has variable boundaries, and is something like the set of places which *currently* observe the same time (although perhaps US EST and CDT might be considered different time zones). In this model, counties in Kentucky change time zone, rather than creating a new time zone, when they switch. So translating this mindset to the computer world, if you are in Wayne County you would manually change your $TZ from US/Central to US/Eastern on 2000-10-29. Of course, this simplistic model has a fairly obvious problem. You can't compute times across a discontinuity like that in any sensible way, which is why this group has a different concept of what a time zone is - that it has a history attached and does not have variable boundaries (in theory). Might it reduce this confusion if the TZ group used something like "time zone history" or "time zone ruleset" instead of just "time zone", to distinguish it from the epheremal idea of "time zone" in popular usage? __________________________________________________________________________ David Keegel <djk@cyber.com.au> URL: http://www.cyber.com.au/users/djk/ Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management