On 11/03/2016 09:39 AM, Robert Elz wrote:
When I get to watch live US sport, there are frequently (useless to me) ads for following programs, which are typically stated as to start at (something like) 9 ET / 8 CT
Good point, and I imagine that Australian sports broadcasts do something similar. However, abbreviations like "ET" would have introduced ambiguity in the original 7th Edition Unix implementation that inspired tzdata, and I expect such abbreviations were avoided in Unix for that reason. tzdata has kept to the Unix tradition in its abbreviations. I just now looked for counterexamples, and all I found were typos in old Palestinian time stamps, which I will send out a proposed patch shortly for.
best would be to delete all the abbreviations
Sometimes I'm tempted to do that. There's quite a bit of practice dating back to the 1970s, though, and we're having plenty of trouble deleting just the invented abbreviations which are considerably more recent. Perhaps my successor can take on the larger task....