June 8, 2012
5:10 p.m.
Just FYI. In Unicode CLDR we needed to define a set of abbreviations for timezone IDs. They have a different purpose than what's been discussed here; they are purely internal ids, and only required because of restrictions in BCP47 (so they all needed to be sequences of 3 to 8 ASCII alphanumerics - case not significant). What we did was use the United Nations LOCODE values whenever available, which are all 5 characters long and start with the country code. When there wasn't one available, we used values that were not of length 5 so that they wouldn't collide with future values. So America/Los_Angeles gets "uslax", while Etc/GMT-1 gets "utce01". http://unicode.org/repos/cldr/tags/release-21-0-2/common/bcp47/timezone.xml