On Mar 4, 2013, at 9:45 AM, Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com> wrote:

> In case anyone’s interested, there’s a discussion on es-discuss@mozilla.org (the ecmascript discussion list) about time zone identifiers in Javascript.

In case anyone's interested, here's the page at mozilla.org for that mailing list:

        https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss

>From looking at the "Internationalization: Support for IANA time zones" thread in the March 2013 archives, one issue they have is that time zone IDs can disappear.  Asia/Calcutta -> Asia/Kolkata appears to be one example.

Another issue mentioned at least in passing is the old "surprising choice of city name" issue.

As per an earlier suggestion I may have made, should we pick a bunch of numerical identifiers for all zones, make *those* the official zone IDs, leave the old names behind as aliases, and thus avoid having to worry about

        1) people complaining we picked the "wrong" city for the zone name;

        2) the "right" city changing due to population changes;

        3) a city's name or name spelling changing;

etc..

This is at most a half-humorous suggestion.

Alphanumeric might be an alternative, as long as we don't end up using the letters for something that sounds like a city name.