For WorldTimeServer.com at least, we used two government sources for our time zone abbreviations for Australia: 1. Australia.gov.au at http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/time 2. Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/daysavtm.shtml There has been plenty of discussion in the past about how official these abbreviations are or how widely accepted within Australia these are, so keep in mind I'm not trying to reopen debate or anything, just responding to the question about where we got the idea to call it what we have. Best Regards, Bill Tiede www.ChaosSoftware.com; www.WorldTimeServer.com Original message From: Willy@willylorenzo.com To: tz@iana.org; Dated: 10/30/2011 10:12:51 AM Subject: Re: [tz] Sydney,Australia (and other places) DST indication (or lack thereof) I've been unable to download the full mail archive to search it for things like this. However, I just now found gmane.org so I'm now able to search the archive. I see that there has been a lot of talk about the labels, but I think my question is different, as I'm not asking if it should be changed. I accept EST, and that's that. I mean...isn't this set by the laws of the area in question? Nothing we can do about that...right? I was wondering more about the usage of the string EDT by the websites, which, to me at least, appears wrong. It made me wonder how dateandtime.com and worldtimeserver.com are arriving at this label...if, in addition to the tz database, they're maybe including cultural usage considerations into the results. I'm hoping that Steffen Thorsen may respond and explain the result. The EDT usage piqued my interest because of a similar situation in the US with postal addressing. There are cities who are referenced by a common name instead of their official name...and the better commercial ZIP code databases will include a list of alternate names for cities. So I was wondering if this was a similar situation of there being an alternate common usage, and possibly a list of common labels alternates somewhere. on Sun Oct 30 08:44:55 2011"Robert Elz" kre@munnari.OZ.AU wrote:

| So I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is some unwritten accepted

| practice of referring to Australian daylight saving time as EDT

As Philip said, there has been a lot of disscussion of this topic over

the years - check the list archives - and I doubt there's much to be

gained by doing it all again. Referring to summer time as "daylight

saving time" is relatively common in normal usages, though it is actually

defined as "summer time" in most of the Aust jurisdictions (the states are

in charge, not the Commonwealth govt) - but actual use of the string "EDT"

is (or was, the last time I looked) relatively rare.

kre