FW: Time Zone question

[Olson, Arthur David (NCI)]

Rajendra is not on the time zone mailing list; be sure to address replies
appropriately.

				--ado

-----Original Message-----
From:	Dodhiawala, Rajendra [SMTP:raj.dodhiawala at cacheflow.com]
Sent:	Tuesday, February 15, 2000 4:42 PM
To:	tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov
Subject:	Time Zone question

I have looked at various resources for Time Zone data and found your tzcode,
tzdata files to be most
useful. Unfortunately, there is one piece of information I have not be able to
locate on any of the
TimeZone-related resources on the Internet:

- What is a good way to display time such that TZ info is absolutely clear.

ISO 8601 falls short of this. For example, 
	YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss-08:00
is insufficient because -08:00 is -07:00 in the summer and thus
indistinguishable from Arizona which
also uses -07:00.

Adding the timezone makes sense, as in
	YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss-07:00PST

Is there any standard for this or precedence on how this is handled in current
(popular?) operating
systems. Any other pointers?

Finally, is there any program/script (for Linux, for example) that will display
all the
abbreviations based on the rules in the zone.tab and continent files? Just the
most recent
abbreviation will do. Such a program would eliminate errors when manually
extracting zone
abbreviations. 

Appreciate your response,
--Raj