[tz] EST/EDT vs AEST/AEDT in AQ

John Hawkinson jhawk at mit.edu
Mon Apr 15 13:46:12 UTC 2013


Hang on here.
Choosing to not use 'D' to mean something different from everything else
is not "overloading" the field. 

If I understand correctly, the region in question, Lord Howe, has three
seasonal variations.

If there is a Standard and a Daylight and a Half, I think it makes
sense for them to use different abbreviations. As we noted earlier,
one of the frequent use cases of the abbrevs is for a user to type
'date' and use the abbrev output to determine which seasonal variation
we are in (in my case, whether I am in US/Eastern's Eastern Daylight
Time or Eastern Standard Time).

On the other hand, I don't think LHDT/LHST/LHHDT is a good choice,
because like it or not, some people get confused by the 'D'. Be liberal
in what you accept, but rigorous in what you send.

I think LHDT/LHST/LHHT was originaly proposed? To me that would be better.
What is the downside to it?

Maybe that's what we're discussing? I can't tell, the discussion has
gotten so abstract without concrete examples and looking back at the
last 50 or so tz messages that mention Lord Howe is not supre-clear.

--jhawk at mit.edu
  John Hawkinson

Clive D.W. Feather <clive at davros.org> wrote on Mon, 15 Apr 2013
at 13:50:54 +0100 in <20130415125054.GF35846 at davros.org>:

> These abbreviations are there for hysterical raisins (as we used to call
> it in my youth). They're already fundamentally broken - trying to add
> structure to them is doomed.



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