On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 9:29 PM, Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au> wrote:
The obvious name, if we were to insist on qualifying zone abbreviations wth references to location, would be "American Eastern Standard Time" (etc) - abbreviated as AEST... After all it applies in both Canada and the US, so USEST would require a CEST for what is essentially the same thing, and doesn't it also apply in parts of Latin America? So, AEST for Australia and AEST for the US/Canada etc.
Not complete enough! What about using the ISO-3166 2-letter abbrev (the ISO codes are already in the distribution, iso3166.tab )? So: - USEST - CAEST - AUEST - etc This should be unambiguous enough, I think. This could be extended, for historical contexts, with ISO-8601: - VECST-20110612 (Venezuala Time, as changed on 12 June 2011) - VECST-20120801 (etc) and so on.
Or we just leave well enough alone, and leave things as they are.
Oh. Well, if you are going to take the sensible approach ... I think the issue is simple: "While taking no position on the advisability and necessity of unique or user-friendly timezone abbreviations, this is not in the mandate of Mr Olson's group". -- Sanjeev Gupta +65 98551208 http://www.linkedin.com/in/ghane