Chuck Soper <chucks@lmi.net> writes:
I suggest that two new columns be added to zone.tab, location (city) and sub-division (state/province). The sub-division would be for the city not the entire time zone region. For example, Illinois for America/Chicago.
But America/Chicago identifies a fairly large chunk of the United States, including Iowa, Missouri, most of (but not all of) Kansas, etc. The main idea behind the "America/Chicago" and the current latitude/longitude is to identify a single point in the region, a point that will continue to be identified if the region splits (an event that occurs from time to time). The latitude/longitude is a quite-inadequate substitute for what is really needed (namely, the entire region boundary), but it's the best we've got right now. I worry that adding a column with data like "Illinois" would be a step in the wrong direction, and would cause more confusion than it would cure, since "Illinois" is an attribute of Chicago, and is not a direct attribute of the America/Chicago TZID. What we really need are the region boundaries (ideally hooked up to GPS :-), or some data that will let us derive the region boundaries from other databases. The current "comments" column is an informal attempt in that direction, and I'd rather focus our efforts there.