Stephen Colebourne wrote:
I'll just turn all the underscores in tzids into spaces and make an option menu out of them!" stuff done by some other OSes. There are now data files freely available that can support that. Moving on from my dumb academic statement, I agree entirely that a good user interface should not expose raw or mangled raw zone IDs. CLDR offers good textual forms for example.
Or after asking their home country, only add a timezone selection if that is necessary? I think that the naming of zones is something of a smoke screen, although we do need a good cross reference as to what location uses what timezone - and when, and on edge cases it may well be difficult for a local to pick which of two time zones is right for them? It is the quality of the data that is the first problem, and making sure that what is presented is as complete as possible rather than saying 'It's too difficult so we will not try'. The best people to research local data are the locals themselves and while some parts of the world documentary evidence may be none existent, even that is a fact that should be advised! Basically despite previous best practice, there is now a growing need to complete the picture but it does require the assistance of the world in general to do that. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk