The sooner it's permanently repealed, the better! This map in particular shows how crazy it is—it's used in this Wikipedia article.
Not only do we humans have more important things to worry about, DST doesn't fix a problem—especially thanks to something like electricity...
19h51m28s
20h51m28s
20h21m28s (My proposal for half-way as a trade-off between winter- and summer time.)
Of course, good luck to all those who made applications (heavily) rely on DST...
As for more alternatives? Some would actually argue that we should stick to winter time permanently--and then maybe either start work earlier or simply shorten the work days... Others would prefer permanent summer time...
<?php
// Test to see if DST is in effect and then set some variables:
if (date('I') == '0') { $dst_state_0 = 0; $dst_state_1 = 1; } else { $dst_state_0 = -1; $dst_state_1 = 0; }
$base_time = 'H\hi\ms\s';
$get_hour = date('H');
$current_time = date($base_time, mktime($get_hour+$dst_state_0));
$current_time_DST = date($base_time, mktime($get_hour+$dst_state_1));
$current_time_30min_hw = date($base_time, mktime($get_hour+$dst_state_0, date('i')+30));
// Extremely simple example:
echo $current_time_hw;
?>