On Tue, Apr 2, 2013, at 15:11, Philip Newton wrote:
On 2 April 2013 19:42, Tobias Conradi <tobias.conradi@gmail.com> wrote:
Exactly, and that would be communicated how, in a brief manner - as Mark used in "Mondays at 8:00 PT"
On the other hand, if the meeting took place in Berlin, some would say "Mondays at 8:00 CET" while others would say "an Montagen um 8:00 MEZ".
Which is a case for placing such time zone abbreviations in localisation frameworks such as CLDR rather than in the tz database.
Yes, it is. And, in fact, there are time zone abbreviations in CLDR. However, there are no C implementations that natively support the time zone abbreviations in CLDR - in no small part, I suspect, due to the lack of any support for either localized timezone abbreviations or metazone specification in the tzfile binary format. Metazones, for those who don't already know, are things that group zones that are "the same timezone" (e.g. the two dozen or so U.S. and Canada -05:00 EST/-04:00 EDT zones are all "America_Eastern", your CET/MEZ/whatever are all "Europe_Central", etc) together, and are the key used to look up the localized timezone names and abbreviations. They include a standard and daylight offset, and of course a name, but _not_ the question of whether DST is used at all, or what the specific changeover dates for it are. The data is at http://unicode.org/repos/cldr/trunk/common/supplemental/metaZones.xml, but note that it does not cover changes before 1970 (for example, America/Indianapolis is simply mapped to America_Eastern, rather than showing it should be America_Central before 1955 Apr 24 and from 1957 Sep 29 to 1958 Apr 27.) Really, metazone specification itself seems like it _should_ be the domain of tz rather than CLDR. But it would require an incompatible extension to the syntax of the timezone source files.