While UTC may be the better term, it is far less well known. Mark ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Pizzini" <tz.@explicate.org> To: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com> Cc: <tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov> Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 01:20 Subject: Re: Timezone translations
On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 04:04:46PM -0700, Mark Davis wrote:
Here is the problem. You fill in a calendar form for a recurring meeting, one that is to happen at "10:00 am GMT". If (a) the software maps the "GMT" to the tzid Europe/London, then the time of that meeting will be 10:00Z in the winter, and change to 09:00Z in the summer. If (b) the software maps "GMT" to Etc/GMT, then that meeting will be at 10:00Z all year round. It can't do both, and doing (a) would cause all kinds of other problems.
If you (or others) have any ideas for handling this, I'd be glad to forward them.
For this specific case, the right thing to do is discourage the old historical (pre-1972) usage of GMT as "universal time", and promote the proper modern term UTC instead. Said a different way, GMT is the time that Britan observes during the winter; UTC is the so-called "universal" time that most countries use as a reference for their civil time (adjusted by the local zone offset); use of GMT to mean UTC is wrong (though apparently still quite common).
--Ken Pizzini