I recently found this Australian government web page on time zones: <http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia-13time> And this government web page lists time zone names and abbreviations: <http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/daysavtm.shtml> I have read the notes in the australasia tzdata file. Should the current official time zone abbreviations be used rather than the popular ones? This would be my preference. Perhaps, the older tz abbreviations without the "A" for Australia could be maintained for dates in the past similar to using PWT (Pacific Wartime) for Pacific Time? Thanks, Chuck
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 13:06:12 -0700 From: Chuck Soper <chucks2@veladg.com> Message-ID: <p06230906c0a4f427a3a0@[192.168.1.50]> | I have read the notes in the australasia tzdata file. Should the | current official time zone abbreviations be used rather than the | popular ones? This would be my preference. What "official"? In Australia the time is legislated (except for ACT) by the state governments, not the commonwealth government - so if you were looking for anything official, you're looking in the wrong place. Unless there's been a recent update I haven't heard of (not impossible) at least the Victorian legislation defines Eastern Standard Time and Eastern Summer Time (definitely not daylight saving time). Further, since it is Victorian Legislation, if it were to put a location designator in it, it would most likely be Victorian Eastern Standard Time rather than Australian (and similar for NSW, Tas & Qld). The time in Melbourne, or Sydney (etc) is "Australian Eastern Standard Time" in exactly the same way the time in New York (or Washington, DC) is "United States Eastern Standard Time" and the time in Ottawa is "Canadian Eastern Standard Time". I suspect that you'll find that those web pages are just attempting to provide information to the masses in a "friendly" format, and are not even pretending to be accurate - neither of them even mentions Lord Howe Island, let alone the western parts of NSW that operate on SA time rather than NSW time. Leave the Aust tz abbreviations as they are. kre
Chuck Soper <chucks2@veladg.com> writes:
Should the current official time zone abbreviations be used rather than the popular ones?
That could be. I reran the AltaVista queries that I used on 2001-04-05 (and documented in "australasia") and got quite different results this time: 548 "Eastern Summer Time" AND domain:au 181 "Australian Eastern Summer Time" AND domain:au 10,200 "Eastern Daylight Time" AND domain:au 3,740 "Australian Eastern Daylight Time" AND domain:au 2,130,000 "EST" and domain:au 133,000 "EDT" and domain:au 7,070,000 "AEST" and domain:au 1,900,000 "AEDT" and domain:au 161,000 "CST" and domain:au 26,100 "CDT" and domain:au 482,000 "ACST" and domain:au 265,000 "ACDT" and domain:au 153,000 "WST" and domain:au 545,000 "AWST" and domain:au To double check this I ran similar queries on Google, and got the following approximate hit counts: 216,000 "Eastern Summer Time" site:.au 228,000 "Australian Eastern Summer Time" site:.au 105,000 "Eastern Daylight Time" site:.au 97,800 "Australian Eastern Daylight Time" site:.au 7,730,000 "EST" site:.au 353,000 "EDT" site:.au 15,600,000 "AEST" site:.au 1,440,000 "AEDT" site:.au 433,000 "CST" site:.au 48,100 "CDT" site:.au 488,000 "ACST" site:.au 372,000 "ACDT" site:.au 600,000 "WST" site:.au 495,000 "WST" site:.au This indicates that (on the web, at least) there's been a decisive shift from "summer time" to "daylight time" in Australia, and a shift from abbreviations like "EST" or "EST/EDT" to abbreviations like "AEST/AEDT". Would any other Australians care to chime in on this? Is there a sense that the American-style time zone terminology has taken over from the British in the last five years?
Perhaps, the older tz abbreviations without the "A" for Australia could be maintained for dates in the past similar to using PWT (Pacific Wartime) for Pacific Time?
The PWT/PDT transition is easy, since it's just the end of the war. But as far as I know switching from EST to AEST would be tricky, since there's no specific point at which the switchover could be said to have occurred. Unless there's some official time stamp somewhere (some law or regulation establishing the abbreviations, perhaps?).
On 2006-06-01, Paul Eggert wrote:
This indicates that (on the web, at least) there's been a decisive shift from "summer time" to "daylight time" in Australia, and a shift from abbreviations like "EST" or "EST/EDT" to abbreviations like "AEST/AEDT".
Would any other Australians care to chime in on this?
As an Australian, I'd love to see our zones become different from the EST/EDT stuff -- as long as we use those names, which are indistinguishable from the US names, lots of stupid software tends to just express dates as if they were US zones, even when the date field being parsed also contains an unambiguous numeric value. I know it's not the job of the TZ database to fix this broken software, but changing this seems easy to do and would have a definite benefit, in my opinion. And, since we have no proper legislative control of this stuff in Australia, the TZ database is free to go its own way, so long as that way is generally useful. Greg
Paul Eggert wrote:
Should the current official time zone abbreviations be used rather than the popular ones?
Definitely.
Would any other Australians care to chime in on this? Is there a sense that the American-style time zone terminology has taken over from the British in the last five years?
Even if people commonly say 'Summer Time' or 'Standard Time' (which is rather silly statement given that people rarely talk about time zones at all), the abbreviations being the same is ludicrous because they are lossy and cannot be used as replacements for the full spoken version. It is necessary for acronyms to be unique in the contexts they are commonly used. If the EST/EST acronyms still win out on web popularity, I think this is purely a result of the pervasiveness of this time zone database. While less important than getting unique abbreviations, disambiguating the Australian time zones from the US ones would also be a win for the Australian users of the time zone database. To the vast majority of the world, EST is a US time zone and that will not change even if all several million eastern seaboard Australians jumped up and down and yelled otherwise. And we are the ones who pay the price in confusion, ambiguous data and software that only works for us when we set our systems to UTC. Bleating about correctness and trying to hold back the tide when the sea has already reached our neck is a disservice to the Australian users of the time zone database.
Perhaps, the older tz abbreviations without the "A" for Australia could be maintained for dates in the past similar to using PWT (Pacific Wartime) for Pacific Time?
The PWT/PDT transition is easy, since it's just the end of the war. But as far as I know switching from EST to AEST would be tricky, since there's no specific point at which the switchover could be said to have occurred. Unless there's some official time stamp somewhere (some law or regulation establishing the abbreviations, perhaps?).
A case could be made for backdating it to when Microsoft Windows started using Australia Eastern Standard Time and Australia Eastern Daylight Time - I suspect 1998. The major time zone databases (Microsoft's and this one) create the standards when there are no government decrees to say otherwise (and when they disagree with the standards, people will believe what their computer tells them anyway.) -- Stuart Bishop <stuart@stuartbishop.net> http://www.stuartbishop.net/
participants (5)
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Chuck Soper -
Greg Black -
Paul Eggert -
Robert Elz -
Stuart Bishop