| It looks like there is only one valid timezone abbreviation, which is | EST! EST seems to change its offset whenever Australia/Melbourne | changes from dst or back? That's right, and it isn't "dst", it is "summer time" - the Summer Time Act (1974?) defines the time zones as Eastern Standard Time, and Eastern Summer Time - both "EST" - which I cannot believe is by accident. I also believe it is an entirely intelligent choice (though it would work better if Qld used summer time as well). If you don't like it, ask the Victorian Parliament if they might please change it for you... (but expect opposition to the idea.) kre

Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 19:03:14 +0200 From: Joachim Wieland <joe@mcknight.de> Message-ID: <AANLkTi=yBk1jKsZNgQ5=VGm7ni-GX1Ly1s+K0gbfsqfZ@mail.gmail.com> | It's less about wanting to change that, more about trying to | understand what the advantage of this is... It requires a lot more | knowledge about timezones than with two timezone abbreviations. Yes, timezone abbreviations are close to a waste of space - we have them almost exclusively because they are (and were) in common use in the US (one of comparatively few countries in the world that has more than one timezone, and so a reason for naming zones) when the standard time formats for unix (which is what we're all using) were designed. | To correctly interpret the time, you always need the full timestamp (and | location?) "correctly" depends upon your application - for the people who define the timezones, the principal point in having standard definitions is so that everyone can arrive at work at 09:00 (or whatever) and have an agreed meaning of just what that is, or so they can prohibit sales of alcohol (or whatever) after 23:00 (or 11pm) or whatever, and be able to avoid arguments about whether the time when something was sold was or was not after that time (that is. not having different people claiming different interpretations of the offset). For that purpose, none of this is all that difficult, and for almost everyone in the world, that's all that is needed. On the other hand, if you're interested in looking at a reported time when something happened at one place and knowing what the local time would have been in some other place (including universal time) then yes, you need to know more than just the time as shown on a local clock. But a timezone name (even less an abbreviation) isn't really ever going to be that extra information, as they're not standardised anywhere, local jurisdictions call their zones whatever they want - and it certainly is not our job to try and "correct" their names, that is, when they call the local timezone anything at all, beyond "the time". | and you would need to know if at that moment in this area | it was Summer or Standard time. What you need to know is either the offset from UTC, or the UTC time value, as well as the local wallclock time. That's all that's needed if all you want to know is the time - if you need more than that, then you'd also need extra info. kre