I understand people wanting to have date-time stamps displayed/printed in a particular time-zone format; it is a convenience. Every year everyone gets nervous over the Daylight Saving Time change, esp. the fall change. Over the past 40+ years, I would think that by now every program, system, etc. would have been updated or replaced to make the time change a non-event.
In today's world, with people and computer spread over many time zones who may or may not be separated from each other, it simply makes sense to standardize internal program usage and recording of date-time stamps in UTC/GMT Then provide programmers with simple generic date-time stamp time zone conversion routines to enable processing/displaying them in an external time zone format users want to see. I would want to push users to accept a time zone indicator as part of the time display. For example, 06:36PM UTC could be used when the users are spread all over the globe. However, 02:36PM EDT could be used when the majority of users are the US eastern time zone while Daylight Saving Time was in effect and 01:36PM EST while Daylight Saving Time was not in effect. By always having an external time zone indicator, it allows users across multiple time zones to view them with less ambiguity. Of course, some people and computers travel across time zones. For some events, they will want to synchronize to the time zone that they are currently in. For other events, they will want to synchronize to their home time zone. For still other events, they will want to synchronize to some other location's time zone. All this should be fairly easy to do by simply providing the programmers sufficiently flexible date-time stamp time zone conversion routines and asking them to use them. Don Williams
