[tz] Unfortunate time zone names in the United States

[Fred Gleason]

On Mar 17, 2022, at 16:20, Max Harmony <maxh at maxh.name> wrote:

> Yes, that does seem to be the actual implementation. I wouldn't blame the press too much, though, since the section title "making daylight saving time permanent" is in the bill.

Agreed. But, this little semantic difference means tracking down every reference to those “standard time” zone names in existing standards (RFC 822, etc) and modifying the definitions accordingly. And, despite the fact that those symbolic zone names have been deprecated for ages in favor of numeric offsets, there’s still a *ton* of software out there that use them. So all of that would need to be fixed too. Oof!

It would be much simpler if the ‘advance in March, fall back in November’ language in section 260a were changed to something like ‘starting in November 2023, Daylight Saving Time shall be observed in perpetuity’, and then change *nothing else* in the existing law. That way, it all reduces to a simple change of the start/end dates for DST. No fundamental definitions would need to change.

Cheers!


|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
|                           |             Paravel Systems             |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|         A room without books is like a body without a soul.         |
|                                                                     |
|                                                         -- Cicero   |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20220317/41301a0b/attachment.html>