Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:51:44 -0400 From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu> Message-ID: <20080321125144.GU1172@multics.mit.edu> | If we were to have political links for countries, why make them | based on cities at all? We could simply have Asia/Vietnam. That's more or less how the timezone names started out. It changed because that doesn't work in general. Sure, it would be OK for Vietnam, but what would America/USA mean? (Or America/Canada ? etc...) There is in general no good way to map between countries and timezones. Cities on the other hand almost always map to a single timezone, a city running on two different clock settings would be a nightmare to manage. Even a rule that single timezone countries use the country name isn't great, for the same reasons as using the capitol cities as their timezone names isn't really workable, and also because then we need to deal with places like China, which today most residents probably think of as a single timezone, where we have it split into several, because of earlier differences. Attempting to explain why there can't be a zone named after China, where other countries can have one - just because of some variation 30 years (or so) ago, wouldn't be easy for most people to understand (especially if they're willing to allow Hong Kong to go on being different.) kre