Can someone please tell me why the heck Central European Time (i.e. the timezone for Central Europe) - which has been called that since I was a kid (a long time!) and still is called that by every English speaking European who cares, especially the satellite TV stations - is known as MET in International standards? Where on Earth is 'Middle Europe'?
The time zone in which Germany is located is called by a German law "Mitteleuropaeische Zeit (MET)" in winter and "Mitteleuropaeische Sommerzeit (MESZ)" in summer. Do you have any formal reference why "Central European Time" is any more correct than "Middle European Time"? The argument "since I was a kid" is of little value: Americans write 12:00 a.m. and mm/dd/yy "since I was a kid" and nevertheless the time experts have very good reasons to avoid this notation and use ISO 8601 instead. I can quote the German "Zeitgesetz" for MET, what can you quote for CET?
Doesn't the ISO group, or others, responsible for writing the standards (ISO 8601 et al) have a native English-speaker on it?
ISO 8601 does not standardize 3-letter abbreviations for time zones. ISO 8601 has a much better numeric notation for MET: +0100 (see my Web homepage for a detailed summary of what ISO 8601 says). Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -- University of Erlangen, Internet Mail: <mskuhn@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> - Germany WWW Home: <http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/user/mskuhn>