Hang on here. Choosing to not use 'D' to mean something different from everything else is not "overloading" the field. If I understand correctly, the region in question, Lord Howe, has three seasonal variations. If there is a Standard and a Daylight and a Half, I think it makes sense for them to use different abbreviations. As we noted earlier, one of the frequent use cases of the abbrevs is for a user to type 'date' and use the abbrev output to determine which seasonal variation we are in (in my case, whether I am in US/Eastern's Eastern Daylight Time or Eastern Standard Time). On the other hand, I don't think LHDT/LHST/LHHDT is a good choice, because like it or not, some people get confused by the 'D'. Be liberal in what you accept, but rigorous in what you send. I think LHDT/LHST/LHHT was originaly proposed? To me that would be better. What is the downside to it? Maybe that's what we're discussing? I can't tell, the discussion has gotten so abstract without concrete examples and looking back at the last 50 or so tz messages that mention Lord Howe is not supre-clear. --jhawk@mit.edu John Hawkinson Clive D.W. Feather <clive@davros.org> wrote on Mon, 15 Apr 2013 at 13:50:54 +0100 in <20130415125054.GF35846@davros.org>:
These abbreviations are there for hysterical raisins (as we used to call it in my youth). They're already fundamentally broken - trying to add structure to them is doomed.