Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 12:31:04 -0800 From: "John A. Halloran" <seagoat@primenet.com> Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.20010210123104.00dfca50@pop.primenet.com> | The numbers in the previous list are not UTC offsets. The standard amounts | are true time zones. They can all be defined as "Add to get UTC." Yes, obviously it is possible to do it either way. The point was just that the general convention is that the offset is the value added to UTC to get the local time, rather than the other way. | The following list of 55 world time zones from an Australian source agrees | with you about the name, having "Australian Eastern Summer Time", Of course - it is "Australian Eastern {Summer | Standard} Time" - just as the one in the US, Canada, probably Mexico and Brasil, maybe other places is "American Eastern Standard Time" (etc). "Eastern" means exactly nothing without frame of reference (east of what?) But the timezone here is officially "Eastern Standard Time" or "Eastern Summer time" - and "here" happens to be Australia... | although in order for it to be unique, the abbreviation is still AEDT. There's no hope (other than by forcing unrelated named) to make timezone name abbreviations unique. Most of us simply recognised that as an impossibility a long time ago. You can impose your own set of abbreviations on whatever you control, but you're not going to convince many others to go along with your set. A large part of the world don't have names for timezones, let alone abbreviations for them - there is simply "the time", which you can pretend is called "The time in XXX" or "XXX time" for some country name XXX (or region), but that's just you inventing that label. Numeric zone offsets are easier to manipulate, make just as much sense, and are much less ambiguous. We should just stick to using those. kre