Thanks for your well-researched letter. May we include extracts from it in the next version of the tz database? I recently found a nice summary of the situation in <http://www.dstc.qut.edu.au/DST/marg/daylight-other.html#zones>. That summary contains a December 2000 letter from Richard Brittain of the Australian National Standards Commission endorsing a suggestion identical to yours. I had been meaning to bring this up on the tz list at some point and your letter provides a good opportunity. Your evidence and Brittain's letter both suggest that we should change the Australians abbreviations in the tz data. However, before changing things, I would like to hear from other Australians about this, as I don't have personal expertise on this apparently controversial subject. Can other Australians please comment, if you care to? Thanks.
From: David J N Begley [mailto:d.begley@uws.edu.au] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2001 3:40 AM
I can't speak for Mr Mackin's direct experience, but I can most certainly contest the assertion that, "We in Australia have _never_ referred to DST as `daylight' time" - certainly everyone I know (and myself, of course) have always used the term "daylight savings" rather than "summer time".
I suspect that Mr Mackin was referring to the suffix used in time zone time zone names (e.g. phrases like "Eastern Daylight Time" versus "Eastern Summer Time"), not the general notion of daylight saving time. This may explain part of the discrepancy between his experience and yours. Another possible explanation is that Australians may now be using American time zone terminology more often than previously.
- Browse the ABC News site and see the instances of "AEST" and "AEDT" (even "ACST" and "AWST" for central and western standard time) in
ABC News also uses EAT/EAST on occasion; see <http://www.abc.net.au/tennis/1.htm>. The Australian Tranport Safety Bureau uses EST/ESuT; see e.g. <http://www.basi.gov.au/occurs/ob200000765.htm>. I assume the "Su" stands for "Summer". I've never seen that abbreviation before, but it is apparently common enough in Australia that Novell supports it; see <http://www.ithowto.com/Novell/clienttime.htm>. I even found a few instances of AEST/AESuT, though none by big organizations; e.g., see <http://www.fam.aust.com/watson/andrew/details.htm>. The Tasmanian Department of Education uses AET/AEST; see <http://www.tased.edu.au/tasfaq/geography/timezone.html>. AUSLIG, Australia's national mapping agency, uses EST/EDT; see <http://www.auslig.gov.au/geodesy/astro/sunrise.htm>. Clearly there is not a universal consensus, even among single organizations; all we can do is record the most common and best current practice (and with luck "most common" == "best current practice").