Kevin Lyda <kevin@ie.suberic.net> writes:
Just a thought, Australian TV can be readily watched via youtube and other sites. A quick look found Australian Sky News clips referring to AEST for instance.
I did this research earlier and sent it to the list, but I can see how it would have gotten lost in the traffic on this topic. Some news stations use AEST, some use EST, and quite a few (rather entertainingly) use AEST and EST both, interchangeably, even on the same page and in the same contexts. However, all the ones I found were reliable about using either AEDT or EDT to refer to summer time. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the tz database should just use the most unambiguous abbreviations (AEST/AEDT) even if there isn't a clear consensus in general usage. The point that the abbreviations are useless for software and therefore should be set to whatever is vaguely useful for people is, I think, the most compelling argument stated to date, there's a lot of noise in any possible data due to the number of people who are using the tz database itself to generate the abbreviation, and I don't see any real benefit to be gained from continuing to use the ambiguous definitions. It's obvious that the AEST/AEDT abbreviations are not going to *confuse* anyone; they're clearly in widespread use in Australia already. So they seem to be a monotonic, if minor, improvement in clarity and usefulness. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>