On Oct 10, 2023, at 2:23 PM, Doug Ewell via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
This would be very helpful for applications like ours, which asks users to select a time zone which is then transmitted to an external device that requires a tzid. Thanks to CLDR, the user gets to choose a human-readable name instead of a raw tzid, but still has to choose from among many time zones with the same base offset.
Are they being requested to select their *own* timezone or to select some *other* timezone? If it's their own timezone, can your application query the system to determine it?
Remember that most users are not as knowledgeable about time zones as we are. In an informal poll of co-workers about the list of ~425 zones, some thought they should pick the zone corresponding to the city physically closest to them, e.g. America/Detroit in preference to America/New_York.
Most users should never be exposed to the existence of "America/Detroit" or "America/New_York" or "America/Sao_Paolo" or "America/Noronha" or "Asia/Shanghai" or "Europe/Berlin" or.... But presumably the list of cities is *not* just the list of cities used as LOCATIONs in tzdb IDs, so they can choose a city that's *neither* Detroit *nor* New York. (In macOS, I can choose the city in which I live, although, alas, I can't choose Weed.)