On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 5:09 PM, Mark Davis ☕ <mark@macchiato.com> wrote:
Secondly, I said the "vast majority". Some of the abbreviations are quite familiar, at least for those familiar with the timezones in question, because they match what is in common use. People living in the US, or English speakers outside that have a lot to do with the US would recognize "CST". Tell a Japanese "I'll send the message at 12:30 AMST" and see what he or she understands. In CLDR we ended up dropping almost all abbreviations, because people (whether familiar with the timezones in question or not) didn't recognize them. It's not as if the TZDB is using the wrong abbreviation (at least for English), it's most often that there just isn't an accepted abbreviation in a given language for a particular timezone.
I live in a country comprised entirely in one time zone (Italy), so the sensibility to the issue is lower than in a country spanning more zones. The only way I see other time zones mentioned in media/common people speech is the equivalent of "time of a well known big city" like, "london time", "new york time", "tokyo time". FWIW. P.