<<On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 11:49:03 -0700, "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com> said: [Text formatting recovered.]
Many (I would dare say the vast majority) of end users just don't care now that there was once a difference between Dawson, Whitehorse and Los Angeles. When they pick a timezone in some preferences dialog (on their machine, in a website preferences page, etc) they just want to see one choice for that zone, not three
There are really very few cases where you might give people multiple choices, having already selected a particular country or national region. In the tzsetup(8) user interface which I wrote, users must first select a region and then a "country" (scare quotes because they are actually selecting a 3166-2 code behind the scenes, but the interface doesn't tell them that). The US probably provides most of the complicated cases once you've gotten that far; few other countries have more than one historic zone for each existing modern zone. In any event, if the user has already selected a locale, then you should default to presenting only the time zones associated with the country or region identified by the locale, with an option to "see all". There is no need to identify "equivalent" time zones when most of them are already known to be largely irrelevant. There is a separate localization issue that comes up when trying to answer the question, "What time is it in _____?". I don't know if the scope of your project extends to that question. -GAWollman