🚀 go-pugleaf

Here are several questions/comments on time zone abbreviations and
usages.  I am including all of this in one message for the sake of con-
venience.  Please feel free to comment on only some of what I say below,
even if you don't have anything to say about all my points.

Also, I would especially like some feedback from the people who live
(or have lived) in the areas involved, and who therefore have first-
hand knowledge.

Some of this material may seem out of place, given that we haven't been
arguing these issues lately.  However, I hope that whoever out there is
planning possible future revisions of mail standards will take note of
this message and any authoritative answers it generates.

(1) It has been suggested a few times that time stamps be expressed
    either in UTC or as the number of seconds past a given starting
    point.

    I feel, however, that such an approach would be less than ideal,
    because the sender's local time of day may be a useful piece of
    information for the recipient to have.
    
    For example, suppose all "Date" lines had to show time in UTC.  If
    I were to send a message between 1600 and midnight (according to my
    local time, PST), the "Date" line would indicate the next day, since
    1600 PST = 0000 UTC.  If my message's body contained a "relative"
    time expression such as "today", the recipient might be confused as
    to which day I meant unless he knew my physical location (and thus
    my local time zone).

    (Admittedly, this same problem could occur today, in cases where a
    user and his computer are widely separated.  However, I would assume
    that the local time of the user and the computer are the same more
    often than not.)

(2) People have discussed which term is "most" correct for the standard
    time zone around the prime meridian -- UTC, UT, or GMT.

    (a) What do the British, Irish, and whoever else falls in this time
	zone call their time?  (Judging from "Date" lines in messages
	from UCL-CS, I would assume the answer to my question is "GMT";
	however, could someone from the UK or Ireland speak up and say
	definitively?)

    (b) Assuming that "Date" lines are to reflect the sender's local
	time, it seems wrong to make the British and Irish say "UT" or
	"UTC" if their local custom is to say "GMT".  If other people
	somewhere want to use "UT" or "UTC", maybe the only equitable
	solution is to give all three abbreviations equal status.

    (c) This entire discussion becomes moot, of course, if we all end
	up using numeric offsets instead of time-zone abbreviations.

(3) Would some Canadian on this list confirm or correct the following
    time zone abbreviations:  NST/NDT (Newfoundland); AST/ADT (Atlan-
    tic); and YST/YDT (Yukon)?

    Also, am I correct in assuming that the Alaskans too use YST/YDT
    for Yukon time?

(4) Does Hawaii use the abbreviations HST and HDT?  For that matter, do
    they even have daylight savings time in Hawaii?  (Hawaii's close
    enough to the equator that I suppose it might not make sense for
    them to use daylight savings time.)

(5) According to John Covert at DEC-Marlboro (message of 26 Jan 84),
    Alaska is down to two time zones now (UTC-10 for the Aleutians and
    UTC-9 for the rest of the state).  Are the people in the Aleutians
    going to end up calling their time zone HST/HDT (since it's the same
    as Hawaii time)?  Or will they use AHST/AHDT ("Alaska/Hawaii")?  Or
    even AST/ADT ("Alaska", or "Aleutian")?
    
    If they decide to call it AST/ADT (and thus create a conflict with
    Atlantic time), I say forget it -- the Atlantic time zone has first
    dibs on the abbreviation (and more people, too!), and the Aleutians
    can use a numeric offset if they don't like HST/HDT.

-- Rich <v.wales@UCLA-LOCUS>