Timezone translations

[Mark Davis]

While UTC may be the better term, it is far less well known.

‎Mark

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken Pizzini" <tz. at explicate.org>
To: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis at jtcsv.com>
Cc: <tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov>
Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 01:20
Subject: Re: Timezone translations


> On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 04:04:46PM -0700, Mark Davis wrote:
> > Here is the problem. You fill in a calendar form for a recurring
meeting,
> > one that is to happen at "10:00 am GMT". If (a) the software maps the
"GMT"
> > to the tzid Europe/London, then the time of that meeting will be 10:00Z
in
> > the winter, and change to 09:00Z in the summer. If (b) the software maps
> > "GMT" to Etc/GMT, then that meeting will be at 10:00Z all year round. It
> > can't do both, and doing (a) would cause all kinds of other problems.
> >
> > If you (or others) have any ideas for handling this, I'd be glad to
forward
> > them.
>
> For this specific case, the right thing to do is discourage the old
> historical (pre-1972) usage of GMT as "universal time", and promote
> the proper modern term UTC instead.  Said a different way, GMT is
> the time that Britan observes during the winter; UTC is the so-called
> "universal" time that most countries use as a reference for their
> civil time (adjusted by the local zone offset); use of GMT to mean
> UTC is wrong (though apparently still quite common).
>
> --Ken Pizzini
>
>
>