On Apr 18, 2013, at 12:43 PM, Tobias Conradi <mail.2012@tobiasconradi.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 8:11 PM, Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
Perhaps both databases should be using the same LOCODE-derived identifiers as the "official" identifiers, with all the region/city names used as legacy backwards-compatibility names? Using those as the "official" identifiers has the advantages that:
1) they look like line noise to humans,
UN LOCODEs are structured and not noise to all humans.
OK, "look like line noise to most humans". The point is that they're a lot more cryptic, which I consider a feature, not a bug, for the reasons listed.
For US people: USNYC, USPDX, what may these refer to?
USNYC might be obvious; USPDX, perhaps not so much if you're not familiar with "PDX" for Portland, Oregon (and if USPDX *isn't* Portland, that might surprise a *number* of USans).
so UIs for setting the zone will perhaps make an effort to do something better than offer you a choice of zone identifiers or zone identifiers with underscores replaced by spaces;
Programmers that feel like doing so can do so already.
Yes, they *can*, but I don't know who other than Apple *have* done so already. Making the identifiers more cryptic might light a bit of a fire under more developers.
2) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong City was used;
An often mentioned case is Asia/Shanghai where people request Asia/Beijing - with UN LOCODEs that would be CNSHA vs. CNBJS
That's one of the cases I was thinking of (the other is Kolkata vs. Mumbai vs. Delhi).
3) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong Region was used;
The first two letters of UN LOCODEs are the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, likely not noise to all humans.
"CH"? That's China, right? :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) (Yes, I know why "CH" was chosen for Switzerland. It's still probably not intuitively obvious to many that "CH" is Switzerland and "CN" is China.)