Australian timezone abbreviations

[Ted Percival]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> I'd like to hear more from Australian correspondents on this before
> thinking about specific changes, though.

+1 me for changing to AEST, AEDT and so on.

I encourage you to read through a relatively recent discussion about
this. I straw-polled our Unix users' group's mailing list:
http://lists.humbug.org.au/archives/general/2008-April/thread.html#26929
. If you'll excuse the deviation to a discussion of whether various
places should have daylight saving time, you'll see a preference for
AEST: I count 6 for and 1 possibly against.

Eric Ulevik wrote:
> ABC NewsRadio have been referring to 'Eastern Standard Time' and
> 'Eastern Summer Time'.

"Australian" is presumed for an Australian radio broadcast; for computer
use there is no regional context. At any rate, the discussion should
focus on the *abbreviations* rather than the full names because only the
abbreviations are specified by the timezone database.

I'm not convinced that searching the web for "EST" is a valid survey,
particularly as it is a common abbreviation for "estimate" or
"established". There are also websites such as Flickr that use EST but
there is evidence that this is simply a result of using the timezone
database: a feedback loop. I wonder to what extent the timezone database
is seen as an authority for what people use.

-- 
Ted Percival
http://tedp.id.au/tzdata-au/