Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2016 23:59:57 -0700 From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> Message-ID: <574FD96D.60403@cs.ucla.edu> | And I have some experience in this, as I am the one who *invented* | that "long tradition", and I've seen it not catch on. Actually, I suspect that in many cases you're wrong - some of the abbreviations that are in use were certainly invented by the TZ project, and hence, all uses of them will source back to tzdata eventually, but regardless of that, since they have now been around so long, they have become the standard timezone name abbreviations, as much as any such thing exists. I know that the one for Thailand (Asia/Bangkok) (ITC) was an invention, but now it is in quite widespread use (and in a country with only one zone, and hence no real need for names at all, that's remarkable.) It really is too late now to wish that the abbreviations had not been invented, or to wonder how anyone here got the right to do that - sometimes things just happen - but afterwards, they're just as entrenched as anything else. I also don't really think it rational to penalise areas that don't commonly use English and hence aren't likely to have English abbreviations, while allowing the English speaking world to do as they like. kre