Conflicting time zone names

Question

I receive invitations from other calendaring programs, e.g. Lotus Notes, and have noticed that they use time zone names that are unknown to iCal. I received an invite today that showed up in my calendar at 10:00 CDT. My calendar time zone is set to America/Chicago.
When I looked at the .ics file being imported, the time zone name was "Eastern" and the time of the event was 100000. Apparently iCal didn't recognize "Eastern" as the name of the time zone. It should have shown up on my calendar at 09:00. I went in and changed the time zone in the .ics file to "US/Eastern" which is an iCal option and it entered correctly into my calendar.
Is there a standard set of time zone names or does every program use their own? If nothing else, a message stating that the time zone wasn't recognized and was assumed to be the same as the iCal calendar would help prevent missed conference calls, etc.
Thanks for any input.
Mark G.

Answer 1

It is hard to believe that we 'put a man on the moon' four decades ago, but haven't adopted a standardized method for interchanging event data!
As you point out, it may be a very long time before major organizations upgrade and adopt the CalDAV standard, so this issue may be with us for a long time. As someone who cut his teeth on mainframe processing more than thirty years ago, I understand the glacial movement of major information technology operations, and how challenging and difficult such transitions can be.
I believe that it is incumbent upon major players like Novell and Microsoft to bring their existing code into the 21st century, but it seems an unlikely outcome, as the typical reaction on their part is to encourage an organization to perform a complete overhaul, rather than have the publisher patch existing code.