[tz] Australian time zone abbreviations

Edwin Groothuis edwin at mavetju.org
Mon Nov 7 20:37:05 UTC 2011


On 08/11/2011, at 00:25 , Eliot Lear wrote:

> Two questions:
> 
> 1.  What does the man on the street in Australia think? AEST or EST?

I picked three Australian groups of sources I think have high visibility to the general population: Visual media, printed media and two government services.

- The Australian Broadcast Corporation and the SBS use AEST on their website
http://search.abc.net.au/search/search.cgi?query=aest&sort=&collection=abcall_meta&form=simple
http://www.sbs.com.au/search/?query=aest
Channel 10 uses mostly AEST (three pages with EST, more with AEST)
http://ten.com.au/ten-search.htm?q=aest&x=0&y=0

- The Sydney Morning Herald uses EST 
http://www.smh.com.au/execute_search.html?text=aest&ss=Business
while the Australian uses AEST
http://search.news.com.au/search?us=ndmtheaustralian&as=TAUS&q=aest
and the Daily Telegraph (oh the things you do for science) uses both:
http://search.news.com.au/search?q=est&sid=5001021&us=ndmdailytelegraph&as=DTM&ac=search&r=typed
http://search.news.com.au/search?q=aest&sid=5001021&us=ndmdailytelegraph&as=DTM&ac=search&r=typed

- The Australian Bureau of Meteorology uses both, but gives in their submission guidelines only AEST.
http://agencysearch.australia.gov.au/search/search.cgi?query=aest&collection=agencies&form=simple&profile=bom&scope_disable=off&Submit.x=0&Submit.y=0&Submit=submit

- The NSW State Emergency Services website uses AEST
http://www.ses.nsw.gov.au/
The VIC and NT SES website don't specify a timezone.


Now the man in the street… Australia is big and centralised, lim(x->100)X% of the people in one of the big cities don't care about other states, let alone which timezone they are living in. A quick chat with my greater family showed that they see AEST and EST as the same.
It is only people who manage computers who care about it because they run into the problems with it.


> 2.  What, if anything, would break if things were changed?

Because of the uniqueness of Axxx, less things will be broken than that they are now.
Specially for software which is not written here but still has to deal with it: http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/html/00137.html

Edwin





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