On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 12:04:00PM +0000, David Cantrell wrote: > OK, so Exchange is an easy target. Sorry. But it has found a new and > exciting way to suck! > > For more years than I care to remember, it has sent out meeting > notifications thus ... > > > When: 06 July 2010 14:00-16:00 (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, > > Edinburgh, Lisbon, London. > > Where: Room 1234 > > Note that it says GMT in mid-Summer, when we're on BST instead. What it > has always *meant* is local time in a geographic area that Microsoft > call GMT. > > Now, however, it sends them like this: > > > When: 06 July 2010 14:00-16:00 (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, > > Edinburgh, Lisbon, London. > > Where: Room 1234 > > > > Note: The GMT offset above does not reflect daylight saving time > > adjustments. > > So they've acknowledged that they are in error, but instead of just > fixing the bug, they've added another layer of confusion! Now it would > be reasonable for someone to read either that that means 14:00 local > time, or that it really does mean 14:00 GMT and not 14:00 BST. It's > just as ambiguous as before! > > A real fix would be to either: > * spit out the right time zone abbreviation (for the pedants in the > audience, I'd like to point out that GMT is the right time zone > sometimes, and saying something pedant-compatible like UTC is stupid > as it will confuse people who don't spend their lives dealing with > timezone pedants, also saying things like +01:00 is just as > confusing for normal people); but if that's too difficult ... > * not say the timezone name at all, just the list of cities, so > something like "14:00 (Dublin/Edinburgh/Lisbon/London timezone)" >
The pedant-compatible timezone name is really "Europe/London". Or "Europe/Lisbon", or "Europe/Dublin". All three of those are different timezones, although they probably only diverge historically. The short names like BST refer not to timezones that anyone exists in, but offsets used by particular people at particular times. These names are older and crufty, but by the same token more familiar to some people so they get used for that reason. The pedantic ones are extremely recognizable though, so I use them in all the software I write. If what's really needed to be communicated is the actual offset, (so people can do these calculations in their heads and get them wrong?) then just give the damn number. 14:00-16:00 in Europe/Dublin, Europe/Edinburgh, Europe/Lisbon, Europe/London time, GMT offset: +01:00 Or is it -01:00 during the summer? Heck if I know. -josh
