On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com> wrote:
On 12 April 2013 10:57, Tobias Conradi <mail.2012@tobiasconradi.com> wrote:
Against actual practice in the IANA time zone database, deteriorating usability for those that rely use systematization.
It would appear you misunderstood or misinterpreted my statements. The ONLY "actual practice" which is relevant is the actual practice on the ground, independent of tz.
How did you came to this conclusion?
To be clear, I haven't seen any evidence either way, but I don't particularly believe any residents of Lord Howe Island would call it "Lord Howe half-daylight time", because to them, half an hour is a full transition. Does that matter?
As above, yes. What the locals call it should be the ONLY practice that matters. This is not current practice. All non-English abbreviations used by locals are simply ignored, leading to WIT in the database meaning Western Indonesia Time, whilst to locals it means Eastern Indonesia Time.
While I am sympathetic to your desires for broader systematization, it is not the aim of this project. %s is systematized so that "D" never means anything else than 1:00 saving time.
The English speaking countries largely get their way through with locally used abbreviations, whilst needs and wishes of others are ignored.
Again, I haven't been around for long, but according to my understanding of this project's history, it is solely an English-language project. At least it is since some months an IANA project. The IANA site states
http://www.iana.org/about "The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a department of ICANN" The ICANN site http://www.icann.org/en/about/welcome "Welcome to ICANN’s global community supporting the vision of "one world, one Internet." " http://www.icann.org/en/about/governance/guidelines "The mission of ICANN is to coordinate, at the overall level, the global Internet's systems of unique identifiers"
Localization issues are outside of its scope. That's my proposal: stop localizing to English.
-- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com