[tz] Ambiguous abbreviations for Australian timezones when daylight savings is in affect

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Apr 1 08:32:12 UTC 2013


On 03/31/2013 04:16 AM, Timothy Arceri wrote:
> No ii says “Daylight saving or summer time is commonly expressed as EDST”.

This is splitting hairs, surely.  That page uses two different abbreviations,
AEDT and EDST, for the same notion.  It doesn't say that one abbreviation is
preferable to the other.

And this is just one example.  One can easily find other government sources
that disagree with the abbreviations you're suggesting.  For example,
your own organization's page on daylight saving time
<http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/daysavtm.shtml>
says that summer time in eastern Australia is generally denoted "EDT",
not "AEDT".

We shouldn't try to address this problem by choosing a preferred set of
abbreviations and then finding web pages agreeing with our preferences.
Instead, we should choose what Australians by and large use in practice.
Unfortunately, when I recently tried to do that
<http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-October/018364.html>
I found that the practice seems to be inconsistent: that is,
in some regions Australians seem to prefer one set of abbreviations,
while in other regions they seem to prefer a different set.



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