FW: Revisiting Australian time zone abbreviations

Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov
Sun Jun 13 22:27:49 UTC 2010


I'm (trepidatiously) forwarding this message from Richard Stanway, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately.

        --ado

From: Richard Stanway [mailto:r.stanway at gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2010 5:49
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Subject: Revisiting Australian time zone abbreviations

Hello,
I came across this mailing list while researching a time zone issue on our website which indirectly makes use of the zoneinfo. We localize some timestamps to the visitors time zone, but the site is trafficked by a predominately US audience where the abbreviation "EST" is used quite often. It is difficult for an Australian visitor to realize that the times they are seeing have been localized since they show for example as "8pm EST" due to the abbreviations used for the Australian time zones, leading to confusion as to whether it is US EST or AU EST.

The last discussion on AEST vs EST seems to be about 9 years old and I figured it was time to revisit the subject now that there seems to be an official source. The government website of Australia states the time zone names for Australia are Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), Australian Central Standard Time (ACST) and Australian Western Standard Time (AWST) with Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) and Australian Central Daylight Time (ACDT) when observing daylight saving time. Reference: http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/time

Any chance of these official names making it into a zoneinfo update?



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