J William Piggott wrote:
If you were offered a million dollars to guess which category holds the UTC _file_, what would you pick?
That would depend on which world I lived in and whether I was willing to prostitute truth for a million bucks. In a world where the universal time "zone" has been commonly but incorrectly associated with one particular geographic location, I'd certainly know what the expected answer was, but I would definitely be feeling the same gut-wrenching dilemma unfortunately faced by smart students everywhere when faced with a multiple-choice test question where the answer clearly expected by the test-setter is not, in fact, the right answer.
I think users searching for UTC know enough about it to associate it with GMT, and GMT with Greenwich, and Greenwich with London/Britain.
That is certainly the traditional expectation, but it is not only wrong, it has caused actual, significant, some would say serious problems, such as versions of Microsoft Windows where it's effectively impossible to run a computer on UTC, because the only approximate choice is GMT, but if you choose that it assumes you're in England and helpfully switches to BST for you during the appropriate periods. We'd do well not to do anything that enshrines those mistaken assumptions and expectations. Presenting a geographically (and graphically) based time zone selector is a handy and useful user interface feature, but it need not and should not entrench the notion that geographically-based is the only way to go, or that UTC is geographically based (or a time zone at all). The tz database should lead here, by presenting UTC as a unique top-level choice. We should absolutely not follow existing muddled practice in this area.