<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Dec 8, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Zefram wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; ">GMT is not at all exceptional in the relevant respect, of referring to<br>a specific offset rather than to a civil timezone. MST (aside from a<br>Moscow-based interpretation) refers specifically to UT-7h, not to the<br>dance that clocks perform in Denver. Likewise, MDT refers specifically<br>to UT-6h.<br><br>To accurately represent GMT and BST (as used in the UK) and MST and<br>MDT (as used in north America) in the timezone database, you'd need<br>essentially:<br><br>Zone GMT 0:00 - GMT<br>Zone BST 1:00 - BST<br>Zone MST -7:00 - MST<br>Zone MDT -6:00 - MDT<br><br>and similarly for rather a lot of the other abbreviations. (It so happens<br>that two of these four hypothetical zones are already in the database<br>(GMT and MST), but that's unusual among the abbreviations.)<br><br>If you don't do this, but instead have just links such as BST -><br>Europe/London, then at best it's still necessary to search within<br>the timezone data to find out what the abbreviation means. That's<br>not actually representing the abbreviation's meaning; it's a bad<br>implementation of the hypothetical abbreviation-to-candidate-zone<br>index. (Bad largely because it can only show one candidate zone per<br>abbreviation.)<br></span></blockquote></div><br><div>Dang, I think that would be a much better solution, for me. It would decrease access</div><div>time of information retrieval, if I get it right. I will research as a possible solution, for me.</div><div>Thank you!</div><div><br></div><div>The information I provided should not be considered an authoritative work.</div><div>I am a peon in the grand scheme, and provided in hope that it may be of some use.</div><div>I am not even in a position to take a position on adding data to the database.</div><div><br></div><div>Steve</div></body></html>