A Timezone Gazetteer (and Map Maybe)

[Alex LIVINGSTON]

The project you are embarking on seems fantastic, and looks as though it will eventually make possible the fulfilment of a dream of mine, namely a live time-zone map on the Web showing both current time zones (labeled with UT offset) - in colors reflecting UT offset alone, and not the so-called "Standard" time in that region - and the time in each of those zones. Once such a map is operational, many other possibilities present themselves of course (e.g. zooming in, display for a past or future date).

I'm afraid I can't give you any help with boundary-vector information, but I noticed a number of omissions/errors regarding Australia (where I live) in your summary information:

(1)

>5.      australasia:Australia
>        Indian/Christmas                          7:00  None
>        Australia, Western                        8:00
>                Australia/Perth                   8:00  None
>        Australia, Central                        9:30
>                Australia/Adelaide                9:30  AS
>                Australia/Darwin                  9:30  Aus
>        Australia, Eastern                       10:00
>                Australia/Brisbane               10:00  AQ
>                Australia/Sydney                 10:00  AN
>        Australia/Lord_Howe                      10:30  LH

You have left out the Cocos Islands, which (unfortunately) have a time zone of their own (and not that of neighboring Christmas Island). It might look something like this:

        Indian/Cocos                              6:30 None



(2) You have also overlooked Tasmania, which starts keeping daylight-saving time before other parts of the country which observe it do:

        Australia, Eastern
                Australia/Hobart                 10:00 AT (?)

(3) Note also that Australia/Brisbane no longer observes daylight-saving time at all. (Could it have "None" in its DST-Rule column?)

>        Australia/Hobart, Australia/Melbourne \
>          (duplicates of Australia/Sydney)

As already intimated, this is not entirely true; Australia/Melbourne is a duplicate of Australia/Sydney, but Australia/Hobart is not.

(4)

>        Australia/Lindeman (duplicate of Australia/Brisbane)

This is only true if historical observance is irrelevant. The Australia/Lindeman entry was created for a few Queensland islands for no other reason than that they continued to switch to daylight-saving time for a couple of years after the rest of the state ceased doing so. To the best of my knowledge, however, the two zones are now indistinguishable from each other (UT+10:00 kept year-round).


_______________
Alex LIVINGSTON
Macintosh Support
Computing & IT (C&IT)
Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM)
The University of New South Wales (UNSW)
Sydney  NSW  2052
AUSTRALIA

E-mail   : alex at agsm.unsw.edu.au; cit at agsm.unsw.edu.au (C&IT)
Facsimile: +61 2 9931-9349
Telephone: +61 2 9931-9264